I am very pleased to be amongst so
many people I can respect. I don't think I have ever been in a room
with so many people that I think hold to my values. That is really an
extraordinary honour and I am very grateful to the organisers for
inviting everyone and me. And I see in the front row we have Anwar Ibrahim,
who I met in Malaysia last year at a by-election for the opposition.
Just after speaking to Anwar – a few hours later that night – I was
detained by the secret police in Malaysia. So when you speak to him, be
careful.
So we've heard a lot here about the
problems in the developing world and in the work that I have done,
certainly, I have covered many of those, and we are censored in all the
rogues' gallery states: China, Iran, Israel.
I don't want to talk however, today, too much about that, because censorship in the West is also a problem and censorship in the West is used to legitimise censorship in other countries, and abuses in the West of Enlightenment ideals – which we should all hold dear – and the corrosion of those ideals, not only impoverishes Western countries, it is also used as an excuse for terrible abuses in other countries.
In particular, the countries that follow the common law that was set
up by the British Empire. For example, abuses of libel law that are in
Africa are used to imprison some fine journalists, in severe conditions,
based upon precedents that are set in UK.
So I'm not sure how many people here
are familiar with the basics of my work, and I'll try and go very
briefly through that, so you can understand where I'm coming from.
As a journalist and as a programmer,
and as someone who was involved in embryonic internet, in bringing the
internet to the people and bringing that great tool of information and
publishing freedom to people, I saw that we could achieve a lot of
reform with a little bit of work. And you, of course, all know this.
And you should remember Solzhenitsyn's words that “in the right moment one word of truth outweighs the world.” Solzhenitsyn was referring to a world of lies. But this still is true, for information across the world, and it’s also true of the information in the West, that, in some cases, one classified video can possibly stop a war, and maybe fifty definitely can.
So we tried to pull together a system to automate that process, to get
as much new material, sensitive material, restricted material -
material that we thought would achieve political reform - into the historic record and keep it there.
We have, in the process, become the publisher of last resort.
We, in the past three years, have been attacked over 100 times legally,
and have succeeded against all those defences by building an
international, multi-jurisdictional network. By using every trick in
the book that multinational companies use to route money through tax
havens, instead, we route information through different countries to
take advantage of their laws, both for publishing and for the protection
of sources. And that endeavour has been successful in putting over a
million restricted documents into the historical record that weren’t
there before. That’s more pages of information than is in Wikipedia, we have gotten into the intellectual record that had been restricted.
So, you may be ... well, you won’t, but I’m sure Lech will -
In 1953, after Stalin died, Beria, the NKVD
chief (the chief of the secret police), fell out of favour and was
executed. And the great encyclopedia of the Soviet Union had an entry
on Beria, three pages, and the publisher sent out a replacement to say
that this must be removed, and be replaced by an expanded version of the
Bering Strait, that body of water between Vladivostok and Alaska. And
into every library that bit of paper passed, and it was pasted in some
cases by some librarians - not in others - into the Soviet encyclopedia -
ripped out in other cases, but always the glue still visible.
But that's not true anymore in the West, because archives of information have been centralised on computers. The Guardian’s
archives are only in one place. They're not in libraries all across
the nation that people look for; they're only looked for on the
Internet. And because of copyright legislation, they're not copied elsewhere to other places on the Internet. So when something disappears from the archives - the electronic archives of the West to which all information is moving in to - it is gone forever. It is not only ceased to have existed; it is ceased to have ever existed.
And when you go to those web pages that have been removed from Western
papers, you won’t see the tear-lines - you will just see “page not found” - you won’t see anything in the index at all. We are now approaching the state of Orwell’s dictum - perfect dictum - that “he who controls the present controls the past”. He who controls the internet servers, controls the intellectual record
of mankind, and by controlling that, controls our perception of who we
are; and by controlling that, controls what laws and regulations we make
in society.
So the specific example
that I'd like to give - and there are many, many hundreds of these
(and, no doubt, most of you are not aware of them) - is a litigious
billionaire by the name of Nadhmi Auchi,
the fifth richest man in the UK at one stage, whose birthday painting
was signed by 146 members of the House of Commons. A very
well-connected man: connected politically, connected in business, and
connected in the social establishment of the UK. He attempted to
remove, through legal threats, articles about his conviction for
corruption in France in 2003, in the Elf Aquitaine scandal. And he just sent legal threats; he never went to court. And The Guardian
removed four articles about that case from its records, that were over
five years old, and it never told its readers. They were removed from
their index - when you follow links to them, you’ll just see “page not
found.” And so did The Times, and so did The London Independent,
and so did major internet companies in the United States. But that’s
just one example of a litigious billionaire, and there are hundreds.
In the UK right now, there are 300 secret gag orders. Those are gag orders that not only prevent the press from reporting corruption and abuse; they prevent the press from reporting that the press has been gagged. This is not the liberal democracy
that we had all dreamed of. This is an encroaching, privatised
censorship regime. And just like everything else in the West that
becomes privatised and fiscalised, censorship also is not only a mechanism that is implied by the state. It is something that can be hijacked by wealthy plutocrats, by big companies, to use the coercive mechanisms of the State through the judicial system - through unequal access to the judicial system, through patronage networks - to have material removed permanently from the historical record.
So, in the West - and we are, after
all, in Norway - we should not be too proud about our sense that there
is no state censorship, because we have privatised state censorship.
We have made it more complex and not as obvious. It is not a brute
hammer anymore. It is a sophisticated device, like money laundering
through Caribbean tax shelters is a sophisticated device, where the
brutality is hidden in its complexity.
Similarly, when we see the path that countries like the United States -
which once had a proud tradition of freedom of the press - is going
down, we have to question whether it is really holding those values anymore, and what we should do about it. Because, if we don’t have Western countries as a beacon on the hill for Enlightenment
values, what countries are left to hold that value? You may - those
of you who are familiar here with World War II - may remember the
statement that was put by the Nazis on front of concentration camps that
“work brings freedom,” an idea that Himmler had when he himself was in
prison.
But, in my investigations of exposing documents - which include many abuses by the United States military, which include the main manuals for prison camps like Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo - I have seen pictures on the front of those camps of their slogans. So, guess which camp has, “Honor Bound To Defend Freedom” on the front of it? The defence of freedom as a value is on the front of Guantanamo Bay. And I say, as a perversion of the truth, that that slogan is worse than “work brings freedom.” And we in the West should be aware of that perversion, and understand that the alliance that once existed between liberals and libertarians, and the military-industrial complex, in opposing Soviet abuses in the Cold War, is gone. That once-upon-a-time people who stood up for Enlightenment values, domestically, in Western countries, that stood up for human rights and freedom of the press, domestically,
in Western countries - libertarians, liberals, and the press itself -
were in a tacit alliance with war hawks. They were in a tacit alliance
with those people who opposed the Soviet Union merely for geopolitical
reasons, and that alliance was to pick up a moral stick and to beat the
abuses - the terrible abuses - of the Soviet Union in relation to
censorship. But as of 1991, that artificial alliance - that temporary
alliance - has dissipated; and, so, now we see a split and a reversion
back to a different standard where the natural interests of authority,
the natural interests of intelligence agencies, the natural interests of
the military is in stifling press reportage of abuse, and it has been reasserted in Western countries.
(How am I going with time? Right there? Excellent, OK.)
So, in as broad a framework of what
we do, it is to try and build an historical record - an intellectual
record - of how civilisation actually works in practice - now, from the
inside, everywhere, in every country around the World. Because all our
decisions, individual decisions, our political decisions, are based upon
what we know. Humanity is nothing but what we know and what we have.
And what we have can be replaced, and degrades quickly. And what we know is everything, and it is our limit of what we can be.
So before we embark on any particular political stratagem, we first
have to know where we are; because, if we do not know where we are, it
is impossible for us to know where we're going. Likewise, it is
impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they are going on. I
ask you to think about the words of Machiavelli; think about them in
their negative, when he said:
“Thus it
happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only
given to a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are
easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to
grow untl that everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be followed." [Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince. 1537]
So secret planning, is secret usually for a reason: because, if it's abusive, it is opposed. So it is our task to find secret abusive plans and expose them where they can be opposed before they are implemented.
Because if they're exposed by their implementation, by people
suffering from that abuse, then the abuse has already occurred and it's
too late.
[End - 17:51 – APPLAUSE ]
*Note
also adapted from following transcript:
EU-NATO IMPERIALISM ❌ 