Afghanistan – history runs backwards (British Museum)

Afghanistan is history in reverse. As a country its culture seems to have been obliterated by war and religion. Fundamentalist Islam places little or no value on events before Year zero, when Mohammed was born. The 6^th C Buddhas of Bamiyan were blown to bits in 2001 and the contents of the Kabul Museum smashed and stolen. Sites have been looted and little money, care or scholarship has been possible.

It’s fate was to be a crossroads country, always in the way of someone else’s path to glory. Alexander the Great was the first to sweep through and much is made of the Greek city of Ai Khanun, but what has been excavated here shows a minor Greek outpost a year’s march from Greece. It had its theatre, statues, gymnasium, temples and stoas. They spoke Greek, worshipped Greek Gods, and built Greek architecture. Vines were plentiful and appear as motifs on everyday objects. The other influence was India from the South, with its ivories, lascivious, melon-breasted women carved on chairs, playing music, dancing. All a far cry in time and culture from the Taliban or Islamic norms of today.

But isolation meant obliteration. The indigenous culture was nomadic, and the women buried in tombs festooned with gold showed vestiges of Greek and Indian culture, but little in the way of real art, beyond beaten gold.

This is an idiosyncratic little exhibition that picks on a few bits and pieces from Afghanistan’s long history, but isn’t wide enough to say much, other than the usual Silk Road references and outside influences. Indirectly, however, it shows a history that may have regressed rather than progressed, with regression/progression still in the balance today. The most telling object was a book in the now compulsory ‘enter through the gift shop’ experience. It was a volume called ‘War Rugs’ and showed carpets with helicopter, jets, drones, AK47s etc. in beautiful motifs, woven by hand in those rich colours you only find on oriental carpets. Now that would have made a great and more relevant show.

Cables from Kabul by Sherard Cowper-Coles

SCC has been presented as an intelligent dissenter, a man in touch with the reality of Afghanistan. In fact he comes across as a man obsessed with his own little diplomatic world. It’s a world of groupthink in which the Foreign Office and Military protect their own little worlds, at the expense of the nation, and worse, the lives of young men. He has little contact or feel from the lads dying on the ground.

Groupthink 1 - Military intelligence (self-contradictory)

The bottom line is that after ten years, billions spent, thousands of coalition deaths and many more Afghan army and civilian deaths we have failed. Civilian deaths in particular have negated most of the effort. We failed because the truth has been constantly denied, primarily by a military machine that wants to fight and sees this as a means of survival and budgetary protection, especially in the UK, where the old-school tie and educational contacts remain the most powerful method of lobbying.

Military intelligence (sic) is provided by people with an interest in expanding their sphere of influence, fighting wars, mixed with loyalty to the military itself. It results in an insidious groupthink and optimism. We are told that badly written papers from the MOD, full of acronyms and dense prose, repeatedly avoid costings and that when such costings are promised they never appear. Use them or lose them, Sherard” says a senior MOD bod. What on earth do they think they’re doing?

Even on the ground, the rotation of entire brigades on a six monthly basis reduces continuity and effectiveness, as does the generous holidays and rotation of embassy staff. New Brigadiers do what they’re trained to do – launch a new offensive and get some action. In the lack of a clear political strategy, the military are making it worse not better.

At least the British were sensitive to some local needs patrolling with care, not destroying crops, as opposed to the gung-ho Marines blasting their way across the land driven by loyalty to Corps, not country. SCC saw them as practising a form of military colonialism, a role they were ill-equipped to deliver (in this he shows his fondness for British colonialism, which we could presumably deliver).

Groupthink 2 – Old-school

SCC wrote the book in a fit of pique, as he had been denied the job he had been promised by his boss, who took the job himself. So much for integrity in the Foreign Office! He constantly drops his little references, “my old prep-school friend…been in Pony club with my brothers…Labradors and prep-school lawns…our time together at Oxford…Oxford don.. Scottish Dowagers…my club in St James…once examined me for All Souls..official visit to public school in India (Why?)…been at the same Oxford College as me…farcical Prince of Wales visit…graduate of Balliol..” It reaches levels of absurdity when he invites his ‘old school friend’ to deliver an ‘Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ cabaret to squaddies, who were clearly unimpressed by a bunch of aging, public-schoolboy queens delivering daft ditties in Helmand, while their mates were being blow up. They found it ‘poncey’ – what a surprise Sherard.

Groupthink 3 –Foreign Office

The FCO (Foreign Office), of which he is a part, comes across as mired in protocol, obsessed with Royal and VIP visits (27% of all helicopter trips on VIPS!), old-school, public school, Oxbridge hubris. It’s an unreformed colonial office. Thanks god for the politicians. One of the odd aspects of the book is his admiration for Gordon Brown and David Miliband, who had a grasp of the detail, politics and a good relationship with President Karzai. Chris Mullin has already uncovered the absurdities of the Foreign Office in his wonderful memoirs but SCC does it by accident, betraying his ridiculously old-fashioned approach to foreign affairs. No wonder the Americans see the Brits as an out-of-date, toothless bunch of amateurs. The Foreign Office comes across as drawing its credibility from a colonial past, rather than creating the future.

Groupthink 4 –Afghan conference circus

The conference circus is an industry in itself, often in places clearly designed for delegate holidays, rather than practical travel and access. This is a world of policy and planning by Powerpoint. But there’s no sense of challenge to either method or message. His attitudes compare badly with the more honest Europeans who say things such as “What the fuck are we doing here?” SCC gives us a good account of this process but is also complicit in the crime. After a particularly optimistic military presentation by the MOD he says, “to have questioned it would have seemed ill-mannered” (p26). This is a world in which manners matter more than the lives of young men. Later still, on hearing the same old, over-optimistic plans, he “keeps most of his reservations to himself” (p144). Are we really paying him to keep quiet at such events?

Groupthink 5 - journos

Embedded journalism is also a problem, cleverly designed to skew realistic, investigative journalism towards a sympathetic view of the fighting men, who are being injured and killed. The sympathies of the journalists drift towards the soldiers and not the issues. No real sensitivity for the critics of the Afghan policy only a sycophantic approach to old hands like John Simpson, Max Hastings and Sandy Gall.

What to do?

I’ve used the work ‘groupthink’ because it’s so very obvious that the Foreign Office, editorial class and military leaders are all drawn from a narrow group of public schoolboys who all seem to know each other, but show little in the way of innovation objectivity.

The last two short chapters of the book are by far the best, as he gets down to some clear analysis. If only he had briefed the politicians so strongly when he had the job. All he was after in the end was a cushy job heading towards retirement. In a sense I was pleased that he was done over by his boss.

In its favour, the book gives real insights into Afghanistan, the current decade of war and its failures. His final attack on the British military establishment paints them as little more than buffoons, the Americans are playing a game they are ill-equipped to win and the political strategy is flawed. Strangely, he does not mention the corruption within Afghanistan (the word doesn’t even appear in the index). No mention of the massive Kabul bank fraud. Why these omissions? In the end this is a book that says much about what is wrong with our foreign policy in Afghanistan, but as an unintended by-product, says just as much about what is wrong with the people who are in charge.

Midnight in Siberia - heart of drunkeness

So what is Russia like after Gorbachev, then Yeltsin and now Putin? Midnight in Siberia gets off to an odd start, as the author arrives to work in Russia, as a journalist, not having learnt the Cyrillic alphabet. Even the word PECTOPAH bemused him. Bad start but he a curious guy and with the help of his companion/translator Sergei, takes the fabled Tran-Siberian train, stopping off to interview the people that live in the remotest part of the world. Remember that Russia is BIG - by far the biggest country in the world. Siberia alone is 1.5 times the size of the US.

On a steady stream of vodka, tea and flowers, he interviews an oddball selection of Russians. The alcohol consumption is outrageous, as bad as I remember, when strangers would simply send a full bottle of vodka to your table and expect one in return. This is a country where 60% of men smoke and each person consumes four gallons of pure alcohol a year with half the population classed as obese.

As he attempts to shatter the ice-cold, rude, unsmiling face of public Russia to reveal the warmer, private lives of people. Leaving behind the status-hungry, greedy managers of Moscow, who’d rather order the most expensive than the best wine, he’s soon in a friendlier but complex world that craves for stability. Most of the women he meets are divorced, but holding things together. Trust in the authorities (police, government and law) is hard to find and corruption rampant. People protect themselves by keeping their heads down.

His golden rule is to ‘never ask why’, which is, oddly, exactly what he does. The answers are often surprising as he encounters nostalgia for Soviet security, even Stalin. People crave stability, strong leaders and even when they travel, have a longing for the sort of suffering that seems an intrinsic part of their lives. The joy of the book, and it is a joy, is in the detail. The pagan beliefs that hang on with a mirror beside the front door and the refusal to shake your hand across a doorway, the personal tragedies, the weird stories and incomprehensible cruelties, the irrational attempts at order on an underlying chaos.

Since writing this book Russia has gone down a gear economically but the book suggests that Putin will weather this storm on the back of a people who, in practice, no longer trust or rely on politicians to solve their problems. In the end, however, what he finds and reveals is something I also encountered, a strange addiction to fatalism. I travelled twice to the Soviet Union, over three decades ago, from St Petersberg to Moscow, way down to Kiev, Bukkara, Dushanbe, Tashkent and Almata. It was both exhilarating and infuriating, and remains the strangest, most foreign, enigmatic place I’ve ever been. Thirty five years later, with a great many books about Russia under my belt, it remains as odd a place in my imagination as it’s ever been!

Grayson Perry – ramblings of a rip-off celeb

Listened to all four of Perry’s Reith Lectures and got angrier and angrier. His ramblings were derivative and rarely rose above the level of anecdote and memoir. Autobiography is not analysis. Personal musings would have been fine, as he can spin a tale and shape an anecdote. But to simply parrot a theory, which he stole from someone else, was unpleasant, especially when that person actually died during his lecture series, without Grayson even mentioning the fact. That was unforgivable.

Arthur Danto

Let me explain. Arthur Danto is one of the most significant figures in 20^th century philosophy of art, well known for his ‘Institutional’ theory of art which defines art as something decided by a circle of practice, namely curators, critics, collectors, dealers, gallery owners and so on. Grayson unashamedly downloaded and replayed the whole theory without acknowledging the originator. I wonder how he’d like it if one of his pots was copied down to the last detail, mass produced and sold on. I fully understand that the lectures were recorded before Danto's death, but the last two were broadcast after his death and some sort of acknowledgement should have been made.

Of course, he hadn’t really read his Danto or he would have presented a more sophisticated version of the theory, which is open to the obvious criticism that, if you say that art is simply the views expressed by a circle of experts, that simply begs the question of what they define as good art. It simply displaces the question, it doesn’t give any answers. In the end he was full of dead-ends, such as “Anything can be art but not everything is art” – as vacuous a statement as I’ve ever heard on the subject. Danto gave us a detailed analysis in books such as Beyond the Brillo Box, showing that art had freed itself from the tyranny of history and entered an era of pluralism.

Caught out

The fundamental problem is that Grayson’s a player in a game that many despise, an art world ruled by a small clique, driven by money and fame. The suspicion is that the art has become secondary to their objectives. Perry got nowhere near examining these criticisms, as he’s become part of the problem. His response to serious criticism is, no doubt, ‘call my agent’

A sign of his shallowness was him being caught out by the much smarter Will Self who challenged him on the technological reproducibility of art, something he pretended to accept, but rejected later in the series, contradicting himself. The only moment of revelation came in Lecture 3, when he discussed the fact that technology was often ahead of art and that art was slow in catching up. That was a theme worth exploring but no, off he went again with his personal musings.

Artist as R4 celeb

I like his work and admire the way he brought the underrated art of ceramics into modern art but he’s become that worst form of ‘celeb’ - the BBC and Radio 4 celeb. Sue Lawley did the usual fawning introductions and it didn’t surprise me that he opened his Reith lectures with a reference to The Archers. Oh how the BBC loves to create a National Treasure, especially a cross-dresser, it’s so transgressive dear! To be honest, I find the cross-dressing thing rather creepy, predictable and tediously narcissistic. As for the talks (I’m reluctant to call them lectures) he reminded me his namesake, Larry Grayson, playing for camp laughs.

PS

My local museum in Brighton, yes ‘museum’, has a Grayson Perry. It’s a beautiful object but it’s locked away in a cupboard. This is what happens when ‘curators’ are in charge of art. It becomes commoditised, curated and used as an object in a game that many dislike.

What's missing in Lowry? (Tate Modern)

You’ve got to love a man who holds the record for the most honours declined. Every single honour in the whole crooked system he rejected. My kind of man. It says a lot about Lowry, not a man of excess or self-aggrandisement, merely an obsessive painter. Beyond that Lowry is unfathomable. To walk round this exhibition is to be confounded by pictures that say a lot more than they at first present.

Absent interiors

There’s a wonderful little film clip half way round, of Lowry painting a dog. He does this at speed, just a few deft strokes with the tip of his brush, with absolute certainty and confidence. Says a lot that clip. Lowry’s world is not real life, it’s the stylised representation of a life that no longer exists - that of big smoky factories, chimney stacks belching black smoke, thousands flooding through the factory gates on foot, people out in the streets. Whatever the subject, school, football match, cricket match, market – there’s a mill in background and rows of houses. The mills need labour, labour needs houses and houses mean towns and cities. There’s no interiors, only life lived in the streets. Nor are there any paintings of the insides of factories and mills where the work took place. Industrial work is the deep driver behind almost all of these paintings, yet it is completely absent. There’s one picture of an excavation but this is outdoors building work, not the drudgery of the mill.

Absent vehicles

I grew up in an industrial landscape, of slag heaps, rows of red brick houses (the raws) and the tail end of factories, mines, steelworks. I remember smoke pouring out of chimneys and streets with so few cars that you could play football in them. However, one of the puzzling things about these pictures is the complete absence of cars and motorised vehicles. Like work and interiors, they are a deliberate absence. And when they are there, as the very occasional van or horse drawn cart, it’s for a reason. The Fever Van, for example, that harbinger of death, which took mainly young children away, usually to death from Tuberculosis.

Absent colours

His use of a limited palette, as shown in the show's poster, and an unusual preponderance of white, that rarest of colours in an industrial town, make the paintings seem ethereal. The extremely limited palette, essentially five colours, white, black, red, blue and yellow, focus you on form. It’s a stripped down world devoid of any sense of sunlight, warmth or fun. This is the harsh reality of the industrial landscape. However, it does bring the ‘landscape’ aspect of his paintings to life. As landscapes, they have beauty, as industrial, urban scenes they don’t.

Absent faces

You know a Lowry immediately you see one. Well, that’s what I thought but there’s a few paintings in this show that you’d struggle to identify as Lowrys. But the defining feature, apart from palette, is the figures. Largely faceless figures, dashed off the tip of the brush, often more than the scene would warrant in real life. They stand for something beyond just people, as they’re such a strong force in his paintings. For me it’s the absence of form that speaks the loudest. I don’t buy the interpretation that they are ‘delightful’ in their variety, real people beyond the stick-like representation. Unlike most painters, who rarely came from the industrial working class, he lived and worked among them, and saw what industrialisation had done, to what had been a largely poor and rural workforce. They were commoditised into crowds. Workers for machines. It is only here, outside of the factory, house and school that they are actually people, going somewhere, doing something, speaking to others, playing, watching sport but they’re show, not really as individuals but as part of a crowd. There’s no portraits, even interesting faces. And when there is, such as he Cripples, an awful painting - it’s hideous.

Conclusion

This is a sombre show, all about what’s lost in the human spirit when work strips people of their dignity, personality, individuality and time. Poverty is not fun, nor often beautiful – it’s raw and hard. That’s what it is and that’s how he paints it.

Elysium – hell on earth, heaven above

End of the 21^st century and we’ve creted hell on earth and heaven on a satellite in space (Elysium). Smart idea that chimes with current unequal times, and fears of over-population and immigration, of a future where the rich leave an overpopulated earth with no healthcare to create an Eden in space, although it looks suspiciously like an American middle-calls Eden , with perfect lawns, swimming pools and, curiously, tennis courts. It’s a clever view of a dystopian future that makes it accessible politically – Marxism in space.

Blomfeld saves the day by having some nice touches, the South African mercenaries and Spider, the ganglord hacker. I also liked Jodie Foster’s menace - in an oligarchy, you still have to watch out for other oligarchs. Matt Damon also does the business, although it’s becoming tiresome to see having a British accent and speaking French associated with being evil.

Other smart features are the robots, surveillance and drones. Inevitably, however, it turns into a gunfest. This is a shame, as the best sci-fi, Blade Runner and Aliens, used to be sparing with this guff. Hollywood struggles to make a movie without guns these days – it’s so damn infantile and predictable. District 9 was fresh because it broke the rules; this movie plays by the rules. It needed to be messier, with more surprises.

This is a cut above most sci-fi movies, and most recent Hollywood movies for that matter. It’s no classic but it’s not far off. This Director, Neill Blomkamp, has a talent, which if unfettered by Hollywood pressure, could turn up a real classic one day

Little Sparta

Set in a small wooded crack in the hills near Biggar, Ian Hamilton Findlay's temple precinct is built, as many in Greece were, around a natural spring, which cascades clear water down through a series of lakes and rivulets, around which art objects are carefully placed. They make you walk the half mile to the site as it prepares you for the sanctity of the site. There’s no denying the beauty of the place, especially the top-end lake but it troubled me a little. Then again, most things trouble me - a little.

Some of the works surprise, such as the golden head of Apollo. It springs into view, cleverly set into the ground in a little grove.









The cluster of gold roof slates was my favourite 'spot' - a deft,  relevant touch that works brilliantly in the grey Scottish light.
Then there's the grenades on the gate-posts and little bridges.

But the Latin inscriptions that litter the site become predictable. Setting words and phrases into stone and into the landscape is fine but if it’s Little Sparta, why Latin and not Greek? I like the Hyperborean Apollo feel to the place but the neo-classical words on stone are too easy and often banal.

Popped into Biggar’s only open Cafe for something to eat at around 4pm, “sorry, Kitchen’s closed – coffee and drinks only”. Some things never change.

Nirbhaya (Edinburgh International Fringe)

A ripost (inspired the wrong word) by the Delhi rape in December 2012, five women give their rea, personal stories of child abuse, rape, rape within marriage, chuild abduction and being burnt by kerosene. Almost unbearably sad, most of the audience were tearful. Just as shocking as the sexual incidents were their testimonies about what it is like to experience daily groping and harassment in Delhi, on buses, in the street. Dystopian Delhi seems like some circle of hell.This is a fine piece of political theatre, a welcome change from most happy-clappy Fringe performances. However, there are two problems with the piece.

First, it’s all testimony, powerful as that is – there’s no further causal insight. It’s all WHAT and no WHY. I was desperate to know WHY a city had become a place where women had become objects of sexual amusement. But here I had to fill in the blanks myself – overcrowding, poverty, dysfunctional police force, lax laws, caste, religion, dowry, forced marriage? This is often a problem in theatre as it does not often deal well with detail and a plurality of causes.

Second, the last (fifth) testimony was a harrowing account of a gang rape in Chicago. I can see that they wanted to universalise or internationalise the issue but in doing so they diluted the essence of the story – its Delhi context 'the rape capital of India'. 

Kafka: Report to the Academy (Edinburgh Fringe)

A naked man enters the room then transforms himself into an ape to deliver one of my favourite Kafka short stories. It’s written in the first person so works as a monologue and we, as audience, become the Academy. Adrin Neatrour gives is just fantastic with his ape calls, grunts, circling the stage, as he learns to become a man by aping others. Trapped in Africa, he’s caged but learns to smoke, drink, communicate and eventually delivers this ‘lecture’ to the Academy. It's the reverse of metamorphosis, where man becomes insect.

Kafka almost always escapes critical capture but in this is about our epistemological predicament. It’s about identity, memory, learning, forgetting. For me it’s about the process of crippling freedom through ‘schooling’ The child is captured, caged, learns to mimic, learns from teachers, theory, practice, lessons, but in fact loses the freedom he had as an animal-like child. What we think of as freedom of mind is simply the mimicking of others. He learns to ‘perform’ and becomes this ‘performance’. He simply reports. Wonderful piece of theatre, no frills, no artifice – just one man giving it his all. I was pleased to see that Adrin though the "idea was a wonderful send up of the terrible lectures I had to endure (at Sussex University)." 

We steal secrets. The story of Wikileaks: It all started with an unexpected WANK

WANK was the name of the worm which NASA detected in their system and which was most likely created by the young, white-haired one - Julian Assange. It foxed the Americans and he’s been foxing them, and other sovereign states, ever since. I’ve read several books on Wikileaks, follow the story, even spoken to Julian Assange, albeit by video link, when he was locked up in his country refuge. So does this film tell us anything new? Well, no.

First, Assange and Wikileaks lie in another land, which the newspapers, books and films don’t, and perhaps can’t, fully grasp and capture. So keen are the old media to characterise, nay caricature, the players that they fail to report on the game. They slip all too easily into celebrity narrative, with Assange, Manning and Snowden. So keen are they to come to some simplistic conclusion (every film needs an ending) that they paint Assange as the rapist with ‘bllod on his hands’ and Manning as a sexually confused miscreant. This is storytelling, not journalism. Even worse it’s re-storytelling by lazy journalists, as it’s largely manipulated by the US Governments PR machine.

What the film does is follow biographical plotlines and fails miserably to tackle the issues and these are big issues. Assange is well read and a sophisticated thinker on the moral philosophy and arguments behind freedom of speech. He knows his Mill a good deal better than his inquisitors, who wouldn’t know the ‘harm principle’ if they found it in their inkwells. Assange doesn’t fit the dominant liberal ‘groupthink’ that pervades old print, radio and TV media. He is a libertarian, who knows what the variants of the ‘harm principle’ are and understands the nuances of the free-speech argument. At times the film puts words in his mouth or relies on people who don’t agree with him to state his position, so I’m not surprised that he refused to participate.

In focusing on Assange’s character we’re focusing on the wrong thing. We need to examine what Wikileaks has achieved, which is considerable. It set the ball rolling in exposing Julian Bar and Kaupthing Bank fraud. It has exposed the corrupt and criminal behaviour of dictators, helping oust them from power. It exposed the brutality of asymmetric war in Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘We steal secrets’ is an altogether misleading title. The US and other governments STEAL secrets, Wikileaks publishes leaks from whistleblowers.

Assange escapes capture

Ultimately Assange escapes capture, as he is not a ‘rock star’, ‘lothario’, ‘hacker’ or ‘madman’. He looks unique and is unique as he moves through an uncharted world where old-school journalists simply never leave port. He’s a navigator in the virtual underworld, uncovering places we never even knew existed, dark parallel continents of information where morality is sometimes abandoned and dark deeds suppressed. Assange inhabits this world and moves through it undetected. He knows how to keep himself hidden and uncover its secrets and they hate him for it.

Wikileaks escapes capture

Wikileaks also escapes capture, as it is not of their world. Traditional journalists just don’t get it. The web has scale on its side, scale in several senses of the word. Scalable content – it can handle huge amounts of searchable data – traditional, linear media cannot. Scalable production – digital copies are infinitely and perfectly copyable. Scalable reach – Wikileaks is immediately available everywhere in all time zones. Scalable presence – it doesn’t exists in a country even continent, as it is mirrored on servers across the globe in a transnational space. On the bright side the film does make the following, often overlooked point. Why is the US pursuing him with such venom and vigour? All he did was publish the same material as The Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel? Don’t see them hunting down those journos? This is a telling point – they fear Wikileaks, they no longer fear embedded and emasculated journalists.

In this increasingly emasculated paper and TV world, the world of print, radio, TV and film, he is admittedly clumsier and has been a victim of its clumsy media mechanics. It explains his reluctance to give interviews or play along with biographies and documentaries that start to play too traditional a game. This may be an unpopular view but I really do think the two Swedish women were in fact internet ‘groupies’ who willingly slept with Assange at the height of his manufactured ‘rock star’ fame, got jealous of each other and started a media-driven process they couldn’t stop (there is no CIA conspiracy). Once again the seedy (sic) details of a couple of one-night stands have become the story, not the corruption, connivance and carnage that Wikileaks exposes.

Assange, Manning, Snowden – they’ll keep on coming. Good people, smart people, talented people, principled people,  who expose what they think is evil to public scrutiny. It is a little known fact that Assange had asked the Pentagon to help with the redaction of the documents, to prevent identity leaks – they refused. The hypocrisy of Obama over the torture of Bradley Manning, and it was unnecessary torture, an unworthy act of revenge, demeans him and the US. The hypocrisy of VISA, MASTERCARD and PAYPAL in stopping payments, under orders from the US government, to Wikileaks is astounding.

Big story is the big picture

The big story is the big picture, that these are two tectonic plates hitting each other and causing lots of friction and small eruptions. As the world creates more information, shares more information and sovereign states gather more information, and overreach themselves, there’s bound to be reactions and leaks. That’s real progress. More importantly, there needs to be a serious debate about the limits of the state as well as the limits of free speech. Assange knows his Mill and understands, in detail, the arguments in this area. I think the state founded on free-speech, the US, has forgotten these principles and resorted to intimidation, torture, bizarre legal cases (even a dirty tricks ‘blood on his hands’ campaign) instead of debate. Their policy is not prosecution, it is persecution.

Postscript

This position has been strengthened recently by Snowden who claims that, “The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance. “ This, I fear, is correct. The US has gone feral on information. Snowden makes another point which Assange has held to for a long time, the need for individuals to hold principles that transcend national interests. They can isolate Assange, torture and lock-up Manning, pursue Snowden, but there will be a long line of people willing to step into their place, until the debate is done. Wikileaks is alive and kicking.