If This Be Treason...

by Thomas L. Knapp
Nov. 30, 2010

... but, of course, it isn’t.

Julian Assange isn’t an American citizen. Wikileaks isn’t an American organization. Even if we accept the logic of state, neither Assange nor Wikileaks owe any duty of loyalty to the US government. Where no loyalty is due, no betrayal is possible. Whatever else they might be, the Wikileaks “dumps” of information deemed “classified” by the US government aren’t “treason” (as the usual suspects keep calling them) by any reasonable definition of that word.

Nor, contra US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s surreal claim, is the latest Wikileaks release “an attack on the international community.” If such a “community” exists, identifying it with the parasite states sitting atop its regional populations is like designating canine breeds on the basis of the ticks which infest each dog’s fur.

And talk about the pot calling the kettle black! It was Clinton, not Assange, who directed US State Department employees to spy on United Nations officials — including but not limited to permanent members of the UN Security Council and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon himself — in what looks an awful lot like an identity theft scheme right out of the latest crime news headlines. If the UN’s member states do indeed compose the “international community,” Clinton has cast herself in the role of neighborhood burglar.

But, if this be treason, make the most of it.

The penchant of state actors for secrecy stems from the same motives as any other criminal’s desire to keep his deeds out of the public eye. Their threats against those who might reveal their secrets are of precisely the same nature as the warnings of any child rapist to his victims: “Don’t tell, or YOU will get in trouble.”

We’ve been here before, many times. Not many remember, but the most vehement western objections to Russia’s “October Revolution” were concerned not with nature of Bolshevism but with this language in Lenin’s Decree on Peace:

We have to fight against the hypocrisy of the governments, which, while talking about peace and justice, actually carry on wars of conquest and plunder. Not one single government will tell you what it really means. But we are opposed to secret diplomacy and can afford to act openly before all people.

While Russia’s former allies did indeed oppose communism and desire an active Eastern Front (to reduce pressure on the Western Front), they were outright desperate to hide the details of their complicity in the ongoing disaster now known as World War One. Like vampires, politicians will choose gunfire over sunlight every time.

The subsequent actions of the new Russian state constitute an existence proof of the incompatibility of political government and transparency. Forced to choose between truth and power, the Bolsheviks chose power. Their regime and its spinoffs became (pardon the pun) the gold standard for secretive government.

The strength of Wikileaks is that it faces no similar choice. It’s not a state, nor do its principals evince any intention of making it one. Truth is its entire portfolio, and this drives the Hillary Clintons of the world insane. It threatens their aspirations to unquestioned power. It forces them to explain themselves to the rest of us: To the serfs who, as the politicians see things, exist for the sole purpose of footing the bill — in money and in blood — for those aspirations.

Which is exactly how it should be. “Treason” to and “betrayal” of the state is service to humanity. Wikileaks is your friend. Hillary Clinton is your enemy. Never forget that.

Thomas L. Knapp, Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society, is a long-time libertarian activist and author of Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed. Knapp publishes Rational Review News Digest, a daily news and commentary roundup for the freedom movement.