Whoever the WikiLeaks sources are, they have responded to a democratic injunction far more faithfully than the powers who claim to. In his 2006 programme cited above, Julian Assange aligns his approach with the long tradition of refusal of voluntary servitude launched in 1549, by the famous treatise of Etienne de la Boétie, friend of Montaigne. "Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love", wrote the founder of WikiLeaks.
This ideal of democratic responsibility is echoed by politically engaged Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo, who has paid a high price for ceaselessly repeating to his compatriots that democracy is first and foremost their business: "Voluntary participation in the political life of society and voluntary acceptance of one's responsibilities are the inescapable duties of every citizen. The Chinese people must see that, in democratized politics, everyone is first and foremost a citizen, and then a student, a professor, a worker, a manager, or a soldier."
Logically, Charter 08, which earned him 11 years of imprisonment, demands - among other democratic breaks - the abolition of "all political restrictions imposed on the press", and the withdrawal of the crime of "incitement to subversion of State Power. The charter concludes with "We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes."
By this measure, our old democracies, somewhat jaded and tired, forget themselves, denying, through the mouthpieces of their leaders, the principles they promoted. When France's current conservative-Right Prime Minister, François Fillon, accuses WikiLeaks of theft and handling stolen goods, he is showing how feeble his democratic conscience is: our own legal system has repeatedly confirmed, in case after case, that the possibly illicit origin of information becomes secondary when proven legitimate because in the public interest. In other words, the general public's right to information, upon which the vitality of democracy depends, has priority over other rights. Last summer Mediapart victoriously defended such jurisprudence, in the first instance and at the appeal, at the beginning of the Bettencourt affair.
But the Right does not have a monopoly on this regression with respect to our own democratic values. When the socialist Hubert Védrine, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, casts himself in the role of prosecutor of WikiLeaks by claiming that "Unlimited transparency is Mao's China", he in turn reveals a real lack of democratic culture. No need to read Hannah Arendt or George Orwell to understand that the defining characteristic of totalitarian power is precisely the opposite of "unlimited transparency": total opacity concerning those in power, and inquisitorial transparency for individuals.
Secrecy protects an absolute power, which conversely tracks down the secrets of a society refused all autonomy. This thoughtless comparison is thus a sort of Freudian slip: for both Hubert Védrine and François Fillon, what counts most is that power survives, sheltered by its secrets, while society remains deprived of the information that could give it a grasp of what is done in its name.
In the case of WikiLeaks, it is therefore not a question of transparency, but of information. In other words, it is not about laying bare individuals, but about exposing policies. These knee-jerk reactions are based on the notion that democracy is the business only of specialists, of experts, who should be left alone to act under the protection of their secrets. This is the thinking of proprietors, an oligarchic way of thinking, at the crossroads of ownership and leadership, of power and finance, where, by the privilege of fortune, diplomas, or birth, a small minority thinks itself more legitimate than ordinary people to speak and act in their name. But democracy, or its ever-unfulfilled promise at least, is exactly the opposite: a regime of each and all, where no privilege gives extra rights. A regime where everybody is entitled to speak, express themselves, protest, vote, monitor, be a candidate, be elected, and govern.
And the number one condition for getting as close as possible to this ideal regime is that information be as open as possible, allowing each and every person to participate, understand, judge and act. Beyond differences and nuances, WikiLeaks and Mediapart are part of this combat. This is why we stand at WikiLeak's side, as resolute as we are free.
0 comments:
Post a Comment