Posts Tagged ‘Arab uprising’
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: On how leaks affected “Arab Spring” uprising
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 17, 2011
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: On how the leaks affected “Arab Spring” uprising
Julian Assange gave an extensive interview to Hans Ulrich Obrist, published in 4 parts in the French weekly Courrier International. To the question on the contribution of WikiLeaks on Arab uprising, Assange had this to say:
“We tried in WikiLeaks to have an impact on the Arab societies. At least, we managed to pour oil on the fire. Studying the interactions among the leaks and the uprising are still to be written. The Lebanese daily Al Akhbar (The Stories) started publishing in December 2010 analyses of the US diplomatic telegrams that related to Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.
The domain name of Al Akhbar was attacked and redirected to a porno site in Saudi Arabia. As Al Akhbar recovered from the attack, it had to face denials of services, and dealing with hackers erasing the contents of cables, articles, and pieces of analyses. WikiLeakes supporters intervened and redirected to us the official Tunisian sites.
The New Yorker divulged a leak from the US ambassador to Tunisia, exposing the rampant corruption of President Ben Ali and his entourage. One leak announced the readiness of the US to supporting the Tunisian army against Ben Ali. This piece of intelligence was a strong message and a signal to getting on the move. When we witnessed the Tunisian uprising, we knew that Egypt of Mubarak is next in line.
Consequently, we worked hard to release leaks concerning Mubarak’s vast and deep network of collaborators and far-reaching corruption to even small municipalities and shop owners. In collaboration with the British The Daily Telegraph, we published 480 telegram leaks on Libya of Qadhafi.
These leaks tarnished and weakened the massive support that the US and western States lavished on Mubarak and Qadhafi.
For example, vice President Joseph Biden, refrained from repeating that “The regime of Mubarak is most probably democratic“. Leaks exposed the close cooperation and technical support of the FBI with Egypt internal security services and procedures for torture activities, against human rights…
For example, another leaks divulged instructions to soccer clubs to not using Facebook and Twitter. The Egyptian revolutionary had a field day disseminating this leak of forbidding the usage of social platform.
From the 20 dailies we cooperated with, only The Daily Telegram thought it worthwhile analyzing leaks on Egypt and Libya and publishing any articles relative to these leaks they had.
Regimes and “Arabs” uprising: Random violence, Scare tactics, mass control, masses on the move…
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 16, 2011
Random violence, Scare tactics for masses on the move: Regimes and Arab uprising
Strong “democratic” institutions are not necessarily that impressed of your particular “free” opinions, expressions, or a few gathering citizens.
Strong “democratic” institutions are somehow more scared if the few well-informed citizens are engaged in disseminating their pieces of intelligence to wider public.
Strong “democratic” institutions, and any political system, are mostly afraid of masses on the move. Their goal is to keep the people in a passive state, and waiting for directives and guidelines through thousands of subtle means that they have total control over.
What worry most the power-to-be are people on the move.
They don’t care if this movement is within the right direction of their wishes and desires: they are simply scared of active citizens marching on, because the end result cannot be controlled or forecasted.
That is why, in critical periods of unrest, because of financial or economic difficulties, the government and its various branches rely on rumors that insinuate to the general public that the government is in complete power of control over the behavior of their citizens, and that the citizens have to be fully confident in the decisions and activities of the government.
This fear technique works most of the time to cow the public into passive status.
Karl Jasper wrote in his book “The German Culpability”:
“The one who remained passive knows that he is morally guilty, every time he failed to respond to an action for protecting the threatened citizens, for reducing injustice, and for resisting infamy”
I think people confuse predictive models of human behavior with models for evaluating the performance of behavior modifications.
Institutions of power know how to modify behavior for a period, which is their main power. Institutions sublet research institutions of “scientists” in statistical design, survey, poll taking, quantitative psychologists, social scientists, political “analysts”, and so forth in order to present models that would corroborate the desires of the fund givers.
I doubt that any model for predicting individual human behavior can outperform the odds of a coin flipping mechanism: Prediction evaluation models target a collective of sample people. What the models are predicting are the behavior of a restricted sample of people, who were subjected with modification treatments, by subtle means unknown to the selected subjects, but obviously known to the authorities.
The government policies are to present the image of omnipresence and omnipotent.
Once masses get on the move, the authority is scared: It can no longer predict the actual behavior of the people.
Democratic institutions are confident that, if the masses relent for a period in marching and demonstrating, they will be able to analyze the wishes of the people and counter-attack by false dissemination of information and pieces of intelligence: The authority have large sway on the media.
In oligarchic and dictatorial regimes, mass uprising is far more terrifying: The authority have fooled themselves for so long that they indeed comprehend the mood of their people, and they are proven wrong.
Institutions for collecting data on regular basis, and analyzing them on a timely fashion, are basically not available in developing countries, or believed not be of any serious benefit.
The only reactions in developing States are dealing with the people on the march with brutal scare tactics: A funeral for a “martyr” of the people generates more gathering of people and a chain reaction gets in action.
Many non-violent Arab uprising were successful because:
First, the mass organization managed to control the violent elements by mass peer pressure such as in Tunisia and Egypt and
Second, the mass uprising were sudden and had taken the authority by surprise to react accordingly.
The other Arab uprising in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria… the violent elements managed to take over the masses for a period, enough for the authorities to give the image of applying the mechanism of LAW and Order that “democratic regimes” comprehend very well.
Note 1: The ultimate single purpose for any authority is “Modifying human behavior to coincide with a set priority of natural passions, for a period of time, which suit the environmental and social conditions of the power-to-be.”
Note 2: Random violence is the most applied scare tactics by governments, organized crime associations, fanatic religious sects…: Citizens have no way of comprehending what’s the problem and why they are dying, and what they have done to suffer this insanity…