*

TWITTER | @martingruner

    15.12.10

    Ting det er ok å skrive i Sveriges nest største nettavis nå

    Mine damer og herrer, Ulf Nilson, Expressen:
    Faktum är att vi, ja, svenskarna, faktiskt är på väg att avskaffa oss, om än sakta. Obs! att nu raljerar jag inte längre. Sverige har sen länge minskande befolkning, ja, om vi ser till pursvenskar. Varje par föder statistiskt sett färre än två barn, lika med minskning. Våra invandrare, numera omkring 20 procent, av vilka 400 000 muslimer (varav de allra flesta naturligtvis inte är islamister), föder betydligt fler. Det är oundvikligt att det muslimska inflytandet växer.
    Kort sagt: vi befinner oss i krig, Sverige liksom alla andra europeiska länder (och naturligtvis "den store satan", USA). Det är ett krig på sparlåga men livsfarligt likafullt.

    Det finns naturligtvis ingen risk att de militanta muslimerna lyckas i sin avsikt: att islamisera Sverige (och tvinga kvinnorna att bära slöjor som bevis på sin totala och omänskliga underkastelse).
    Nej, omvända blir vi inte. Däremot finns det risk att vi får uppleva fler och värre terroristdåd. Alla islamister är inte lika klantiga som han som sprängde sig själv i närheten av Drottninggatan. Blod kommer att flyta.
    Eländet har bara börjat. Tid att vakna, att förstå att Sverige är sårbart - och väl värt att försvara...
    Innvandrere føder barn og derfor er vi i krig. Takk for kaffen, Ulf.

    Labels: , ,

    1.12.10

    How dare they reveal these vital, yet completely trivial documents?

    There's a special place in hell reserved for people who pretend that the Wikileaks cablegate-situation is somehow uninteresting, that there's nothing new in it, that everybody who follows the news knows these things. This is often paradoxically coupled to the idea that Julian Assange should be killed and that Wikileaks should be shut down, have their assets frozen, put on the terrorist watch list or bombed, possibly all at the same time. (An attitude excellently summed up in this cartoon.)

    While a lot of the Wikileaks info has been conjectured already, the fact is that Wikileaks gives us hard evidence of many of these things for the first time. A large number of speculative suggestions have moved into the domain of fact. That's simply incontrovertible. The three last Wikileaks give us a systematic understanding of the workings, actions and sensory apparatus of American empire.

    But more to the point, there's tons of new and interesting information. If you really think that there's nothing interesting about this, you're quite simply not understanding what just happened. Or, more likely, being unusually and purposefully obtuse. There's a great comment in The Economist's Democracy in America-blog which is worth reading in its entirety. Here's a quote:

    Greg Mitchell's catalogue of reactions to the leaked cables is a trove of substantive information. For example, drawing on the documents made available by WikiLeaks, the ACLU reports that the Bush administration "pressured Germany not to prosecute CIA officers responsible for the kidnapping, extraordinary rendition and torture of German national Khaled El-Masri", a terrorism suspect dumped in Albania once the CIA determined it had nabbed a nobody. I consider kidnapping and torture serious crimes, and I think it's interesting indeed if the United States government applied pressure to foreign governments to ensure complicity in the cover-up of it agents' abuses. In any case, I don't consider this gossip.

    But that's really just the beginning. Spying on the UN leadership and Ban Ki-Moon? Funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to transparently corrupt Afghan leaders? Projecting imperial power through Pakistan in the most volatile and nuclear-enabled region in the world? Secretly bombing non-combatants in Yemen? These things are not okay. Has the world become so desensitised to American unilateralism that these completely flagrant violations of international law and standards of good international relations that these things can just breeze on through with a shrug and an oh-whatever?

    I'm hoping that the Wikileaks revelations will eventually prove to change our relationship to the US. There's been an unbelievable naivety about Euro-US relations for decades, also here in Norway. Hopefully this will mean that we can finally have some realism about what the United States are and what they do when they act in the world.

    *
    Update: Two other interesting comments I've seen on this. The first is a short blog post by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, who writes about the weirdness of the focus on Assange:

    (...) but would arresting Assange really put an end to Wikileaks or something like it? The point, surely, is that Assange is to Wikileaks as bin Laden is to al Qaeda or Mark Zuckerberg is to Facebook.

    The "culprit" is the Internet, and how it facilitates asymmetrical power and transparency and removes any individual's responsibility for that transparency and asymmetry. No single editor or newspaper editor had to take the hit for this. No one could stop it. Even if every MSM outlet refused to publish these, the blogosphere would soon swarm over downloads which could be shifted from server to server.
    Sullivan is spot on. The ability to keep massive secrets is starting to have higher and higher transaction costs. And massive secrets will necessarily become more and more expensive and short-lived.

    The second thing is something buried in this short comment by Matt Yglesias of ThinkProgress:
    For the third time in a row, a WikiLeaks document dump has conclusively demonstrated that an awful lot of US government confidentiality is basically about nothing. There’s no scandal here and there’s no legitimate state secret. It’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.
    Obviously I completely disagree about this not being a scandal. But I think Yglesias is absolutely right about the hollowness of the secret parts of the state. The revelations, when they come, are always less threatening or immediate than we think. Outside threats are still a means of dousing political opposition across the industrialised world.

    Labels: , ,