My curiosity got the better of me today and I found myself on Wikileaks watching the notorious video known as "Collateral Murder" in which an American gunman kills a group of Iraqi civilians. Like any video featuring live footage of someone dying, it was terrible to watch, and I was left feeling callous for even having seen it. Once I overcame my gut reaction to the recording, it occurred to me that my callousness as a viewer was partly due to my lack of surprise that an event like this had taken place. To me, if the video proved anything, it proved that volatile situations such as Iraq (especially in 2007) create a set of conditions in which accidents, mistakes, and bad decisions often lead to the unnecessary deaths of soldiers, and yes, civilians.
The experience of watching this video left me very shaken up and uncertain about certain points of view which I, and I think many of us, take for granted. Foremost among these is the freedom of speech amendment that we hold so sacred in our society. Watching this video helped me to realize why, with so many supporters of a site like wikileaks, there are probably equally as many supporters for shutting down the site.
It has me asking myself whether America is really on the side of freedom of speech, and if the majority of Americans are really ready to live with the fullest consequences of what that entails. The worst case scenario of full freedom I can imagine is one where wiki-leaks presides as the new media in which every atrocity and mistake that puts stable countries like our own in a bad light is paraded around at home and abroad. I can't but think that this would undercut our sense of safety, leading to a growing sense of panic and chaos in the decisions that we make. Isn't there a limit to the amount of real word carnage one can witness and process before before everyone starts to lose their reason?
On the other hand, there is the argument for free speech and the unlimited right to transparency in the affairs of all organizations charged with our safety and protection. This argument has always resonated very deeply with me, and it's one that W.H. Auden best articulates in the lines:
"Only the truthful have the interest to be just,/ Only the just possess the will-power to be free."
I guess this argument is the flip side of the government secrets position; the more we hide our wrongdoings, the less motivation we have to refrain perpetrating them ourselves.
The best I can do is simplify the question, really. Which morally bankrupt society do we prefer, the one where we live under the pretense of innocence, but live like slaves, or the one where our misdeeds stare us squarely in the face, yet at least we have our freedom?
5 comments:
Ah, but Kevin you force the false dichotomy and ignore all the shades of nuance that your thoughts bring up.
We do not need to accept one extreme or the other wholeheartedly. For myself I think the responsibility of the citizen is to negotiate the balance between these two. To hold the tension and find a middle path.
First of all: Look, a reader!
Secondly, that's fine. I certainly agree one should, and probably has to find a middle path.
But to do so, wouldn't we also have to accept that any argument based on the "right to free speech" becomes compromised, or at best, legal posturing?
In other words, doesn't the middle way demote "principles," those oh so cherished ideals, to the status of "guidelines"?
I'm probably not the best person to be arguing the point, but it seems what you have run across is the mutual exclusion of absolute freedom (anarchy) and absolute order or security (totalitarianism).
If you accept that the result of the ideal for each is barbarous then each side can only ever be a guide for action.
I'm not sure that I make a distinction between principle and guidelines. If holding something as a principle means that you advocate its adoption in the strongest terms without mitigating circumstance, then I don't hold either free speech or government secrets as a principle.
The main reason I bring up the dilemma is to point out this inconsistency when freedom of speech is cited as a reason in the arguments surrounding wikileaks. That is to say, I'm more interested in the cultural reality of freedom as a belief, as a thing that journalists like to trumpet when editorializing on the subject.
I'm not a political scientist either but what you're saying seems right to me. I'd be insane to dispute that modern nations involve elements of both freedom and statism to varying degrees. But that's to say what nations "are," I'm talking about what people desire or imagine their nations to be.
That is an interesting question. One that I can feel myself shying away from because of the size of it and my intuition that the answer will be almost complete incongruous with my experience.
It seems to me that just about any ideal held up as motivation for or against something in public debate suffers from the same issue: makes sense to me for small movements, but seems illogical when taken farther.
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