Embarrassment Leaked

Call him a "James Bond", a hacker, a mathematician, a programmer, a cryptanalyst, a journalist, a whistle blower, an activist - Julian Assange is a package of all these in one. The list of qualities can continue further to several more for this man is truly amazing. An Australian, Assange shot into prominence for his whistle-blowing website - WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange - Profile

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, northern Australia, in 1971, and led a nomadic childhood while his parents ran a touring theater. From his early teen, he was interested in hacking and was member of several hacker's group although he got caught also many times for his adventures. In 1995 he was accused with a friend of dozens of hacking activities and was fined several thousand Australian dollars. He then underwent course in physics and maths at Melbourne University, where he became a prominent member of a mathematics society, inventing elaborate mathematics puzzles. He is described by those who have worked with him as intense and highly intelligent - with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes. On August 20, two Swedish women accused Assange of raping them. Assange denied all charges and claimed that the sex was consensual not an offense according to the Swedish law.

WikiLeaks

Assange started Wikileaks in 2006 with a group of like-minded people from across the web. It was not destined to remain just of the many ordinary discharge portals on the Internet. Within a short span of two years it published several sensational leaks from Guantanamo Bay procedures to Sarah Palin's Yahoomail inbox. And in in July Assange Wikileaks shook the world by publishing the "The Diary of the Afghan war." Then the site published over 90,000 records and intelligence reports on the status of NATO forces in Afghanistan. The report uncovered a number of civilian death at the hand of NATO troops which never came into media and also showed that the Taliban is gaining back the footing in several areas of Afghanistan. Things aggravated further for US with the publishing of the "Iraqi dossier" featuring nearly 400,000 documents on October 23, 2010. The documents disclosed that during 2004-2009 as a result of war 109,000 people were killed, most of them civilians.

Collateral Murder

One of the most famous release by the WikiLeaks is the killing of 12 people and wounding of 2 children by the US Apache AH-64 attack helicopter. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. What was shocking is that the pilots had reported that they opened fire because they were engaged by the Iraqi insurgents. The US army's press release on this issue read - "there is no question that the coalition forces were clearly engaged in a combat operation against a hostile force". The Washington Post's report corroborated it - "During the fighting, an Apache helicopter fired bursts of 30 mm rounds towards several people who had been directing machine gun fire and RPG at US soldiers". But the video revealed the facts to the contrary, showing an instance of sadistic violence committed by US soldiers. The US attack helicopter had fired unprovoked and upon unarmed civilians.

US Diplomatic Cable leaks

On Sunday Nov 28, 2010, WikiLeaks came up with its latest release the 251,287 cables - 15,652 of which are classified "secret" from 274 US missions around the world. The cables could cause a diplomatic brouhaha revealing behind the scene ugly face of diplomacy. Some of the epithets given to different world leaders in the cable are really amusing:

• Russian PM Vladimir Putin - An Alpha Dog
• French President Nicolas Sarkozy - Emperor with no clothes
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - Adolf Hitler
• Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi - Feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader
• Russian President Dmitry Medvedev - Robin to Putin's Batman
• North Korean leader Kim Jong-il - Flabby old chap
• Afghan president Hamid Karzai - Paranoid

Even the countries are not spared - India is described as "a self-appointed frontrunner for permanent UNSC seat".

The point to note here is that the intention of this article is not to cover about Julian Assange or the WikiLeaks. There are a plenty of better sources on the web for this purpose, giving a greater detail about both Assange and WikiLeaks. The purpose of all the above information is just to give the reader a background before we proceed further with our analysis of the issue.

Sources:

• www.bbc.co.uk

• www.guardian.co.uk

• www.nytimes.com

• www.spiegel.de/international/

Assange and his leaks have drawn and are drawing a variety of reactions. Many people are seeing Assange as hero – a champion of right to information and freedom of press exposing the realities of wars and behind the scene diplomacy, to many which common people have absolutely no access at all. The Vietnam war whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg hailed Assange for his audacious work telling that “he has waited 40 years for this”.

However, Some people are criticizing the leaks arguing that the leaks could further fuel the fire of terrorism. But would the reaction of those who have been wronged be any different irrespective of whether the WikiLeaks would have published these reports or not? The reaction of Saeed's son - "I will not let the Americans get away with it" clarifies this. There would be many more like him who did not get the privilege of coming into the news. Us has asked WikiLeaks to remove all the published reports because it could endanger many lives since many of the reports might contain US military strategic details. The reports could also cause a diplomatic crisis for it. US has too much at stake. Could it then be possible that the women accusing Assange for coercion and rape were actually CIA “Mata Haris”?

Still others are wondering whether all these are real or Assange is yet another CIA ploy for US to achieve its strategic goals. The option cannot be ruled out. Would not CIA with its army of spies, assassins, mathematicians, hackers and a world wide network be easily able to stop this? If the fact is otherwise then the credit really goes Assange and his team. He knows the consequences of messing with the sole superpower on earth.

But the bigger question, keeping all these aside, is that - is it right to kill and despise and exploit others just because they belong to a different country. Is this some form of collective Individualism or Egoism? Are all these wars and deaths and exploitations Ok ? Or a majority of us in this world are really lacking some thing seriously  fundamental?

Some older Videos of interest on youtube:

• Assange's interview for NDTV by Prannoy Roy

• Why the world needs WikiLeaks by Julian Assange

• Assange's interview on Al-jazeera

• War is a video game. Analysis of "Collateral Murder" on Russia Today. 

Weltanschauung

    The dictionary defines Weltanschauung or World-view as - a conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it. A more rigorous definition of world-view is that it is a philosophical framework for generating various dimensions of human perception and experience like knowledge, politics, economics, religion, culture, science  and ethics, in short life as a whole.
   
    So why world-view is important? Well not only it enables us to make sense of our life, it also governs our interactions with other beings. A widely varying and conflicting world-view among different sections of human society will not only cause more friction among different people, it will also hamper the overall progress of the world as a result of it. On the other hand, mutually attuned and progressive world-view will enhance our ability to work together for common goals finally making the world a better place.

    World-views come in varying flavors across different individuals. At the two extremes of it are - a narrow world-view, and a comprehensive and profound world-view. A narrow world-view makes us rigid and obstructs progress by making us inflexible and dogmatic, not allowing us ever to question and reason our beliefs and actions. And in extreme cases narrow world-view can lead us to great destruction. Take for example the case of holocaust in Germany during the World War II under the regime of Hitler. Not only the extremely narrow world-view of Hitler lead to his belief of superiority of the Aryan race over other human beings, bred extreme hatred against the Jews, it also engulfed even the common Germans to such a great extent that they executed 6 million (60 lakhs) Jews without questioning even a bit. Even in not so extreme case the narrow world-view blocks the human rationale and insight hindering our development in all the spheres of life.

    Most of us common people have a shallow world-view that is useful for us in our daily interactions such as with colleagues in office or with friends in school or while reading newspaper but rarely contributing anything significant to the human society's progress. Such a world-view comes mainly through our personal experiences and by the people around us. Most of us with such a world-view have it embedded in our sub-conscious mind and we take actions based on it but we rarely do any sort of introspection. However, we do get an opportunity for such an introspection at times, in situations which put our inner self to test. One of my favorite such a case is - the Dark Knight Ferry Dilemma. For the benefit of those who have not watched the movie I will briefly describe the scenario here. To safeguard against Joker's threats, civilians are evacuated from the Gotham city. Joker plants bomb on two such ferries with the detonator of one ship on the other, offering people on boats a chance to live if they destroy the other boat. One of ships carried civilians and the other city prisoners and guards. If none of the ship presses the detonator finally Joker would blow off both the ships. What should the people on each ship do? Kill others and save themselves or die waiting? Do civilians have greater right to live than the prisoners? And what if both the ferries had civilians? Whatever answer we come up with, it is the next step which is more important - analyzing the underlying principals that led us to the answer. For example for a person whose world-view is grounded on egoism the self survival would be the right choice, even if it comes at the expense of others. For a person adopting Darwinist or Humanist world-view blowing up the boat with the prisoners or the one with lesser number of people would be a plausible solution because preservation of species is of prime importance in Darwinism and related philosophies. And in cases of world-views emanating from more altruistic philosophies, probably no one would press the button even though that might lead to everyone getting killed eventually but that would avoid leading rest of the life in guilt.

    When we begin performing such sort of analysis of our actions or thoughts and then check for their logical consistency, it is then that our world-view becomes more and more comprehensive and profound. The different disciplines of human knowledge has ultimately sprung up and evolved by the contributions of people with a profound world-view throughout the history of human civilization. The question ahead is then how do we work upon our world-view so that it becomes more comprehensive, more profound. A more philosophical but apt approach would be to directly analyze the epistemological and ontological foundations for different world-views. But this approach would suit only philosophical majors, being too much of good thing for commoners. What should then be the approach of a common man or a common woman? The answer lies in the reverse methodology to the above approach.  It is my personal experience and conviction that if we discuss and reason different real life experiences in the various fields human understanding and knowledge emanating from the world-views and then objectively analyze their intellectual basis, we would not only bring our world-view in sync with each other resulting in greater co-operation, but it will also help in making our world-view more comprehensive and profound. This essence is rightly captured in the quotation by famous U.S. novelist and poet John Dos Passos - “The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.”

    And that is the purpose of this blog. To share, discuss and reason various areas of human knowledge and experience so that we all get benefited by it. All comments and discussions are welcome. Freedom of speech and expression is appreciated very much, unless it is gets abusive, because it is against my world-view ;)

First Post

Hi Everyone There,

This is my first post. My interest areas? Anything that is interesting on this earth and beyond.

So hold your breath and wait for more posts.

Cheers.