Polish border guards were put on alert when they received orders to detain a runaway herd of several hundred cows, which swam across the Bug River from Belarus to Poland. Belarusian authorities now plan to build a fence to prevent livestock from crossing the EU’s longest eastern border into Poland.
RADIO POLONIA, OCTOBER 2006
In the summer of 2010, actors from the Belarus Free Theatre landed in London looking like time travellers from another century. They were dressed in shabby clothes. They smoked cigarettes, and wondered why people tutted so. Their hosts were old-timers too, with records of solidarity with those struggling against dictatorship that stretched back into the Cold War. Index on Censorship, an organisation Stephen Spender founded in 1972 to help dissidents in the old Soviet bloc, greeted them. Tom Stoppard, who had written some of his finest plays about communist oppression, praised their bravery. It was as if nothing had changed since Stoppard was defending Václav Havel in the 1970s.
The stories the company told had an equally traditional feel. Natalia Koliada, its founder, described how the secret police had threatened her and her husband, and forced the company to perform in private houses or in the woods before audiences she had to vet to ensure they did not contain informers. Koliada had an ironic intelligence and an open heart. Even as she talked about her family’s suffering, she could not stay glum for long. The absurdity of the dictatorship matched its cruelty, and she was soon bursting into astonished laughter. The company rejoiced in the story of how a herd of Belarusian cows had made a mass break for freedom and swum the River Bug to escape to Poland. Polish border guards had captured and deported the beasts back across the frontier, and the Belarusian authorities had promised to build a fence to keep them in. The human parallels the story offered of an unconcerned world cooperating with a dictatorship were too good for the theatre’s writers to miss.
Koliada said that I should never forget that even in Russia the regime renamed the KGB the ‘FSB’ because of the unfortunate memories the old initials aroused. ‘Not so in Belarus. Our dictator still calls our secret police the KGB. The nature of their job has not changed, why change the name? At least he’s honest.’
That was the only honesty on offer. The censors and the censored had to play elaborate games, in which neither could admit their true motives. The actors had to pretend they wished to stage a work for artistic reasons, and not because they wanted to criticise the regime. The censors had to pretend that there were no reasons why any rational Belarusian would wish to criticise the regime, and yet find reasons for banning the work anyway.
One of the first plays the company tried to perform was 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, a wrenching dramatisation of depression the British playwright completed just before she committed suicide in 1999, at the age of twenty-eight. (4.48 a.m. was the time her night terrors awoke her.)
The censor was in a quandary. He knew why the Free Theatre was drawn to Kane, and why the audience would appreciate the work. Along with prostitution and industrial injuries, mental illness stands at an extremely high level in Belarus. But as a functionary of Lukashenko’s dictatorship, the censor could not accuse the company of trying to highlight a social evil the regime presided over, because that would mean admitting that mental illness was at an extremely high level in Belarus. He thought hard before passing judgement.
‘You can’t show it, because there is no depression in Belarus.’
‘We’re not saying there is,’ the actors replied sweetly. ‘Sarah Kane was British, so if any government is being criticised it is the British government.’
The logic of their argument stumped the censor for a moment. Then he rallied.
‘Ah, but people who see the play may think that there is depression in Belarus – even though there isn’t – so I’m still banning it.’
Andrei Sannikov, whose good manners and carefully chosen words signalled that he had once worked as a diplomat, accompanied the actors to London. He was preparing to stand as an opposition candidate in the December 2010 elections, and was trying to mobilise indifferent European publics to the Belarusian opposition’s cause. He and his friends acknowledged that the Internet helped the opposition at home and abroad. It hosted their websites, and allowed them to mobilise domestic and international support. On occasion hundreds of thousands of people read articles on the Charter 97 dissident site. The Free Theatre told audiences of upcoming performances through blogs. The flash mobs which so impressed Westerners also inconvenienced the police. I will not pretend that the Net made no difference. For the Belarusian as for the Arab opposition, it gave them a new and welcome advantage. When the crunch came, however, it was as if it had never been invented. Belarusians learned the hard way that it takes a little more than flash mobs to shift a tyranny.
Before the election campaign began, Sannikov’s press secretary committed suicide by hanging himself. Or that is what the police said. Sannikov did not believe a word of it. There was no suicide note, and his friend had not been depressed in the days before his death, but was looking forward to the coming struggle. Opponents of the regime had a habit of ‘disappearing’, and Sannikov had good reasons for fearing the worst.
The regime rigged the December 2010 election, and demonstrators came out onto the streets. A ferocious police response met them. Contrary to the predictions of Net utopians, phones that could upload to YouTube in no way inhibited the police, or caused them to worry about what outsiders might think, any more than they restrained the behaviour of the forces of the clerical regime in Iran or the Ba’athist regime in Syria when they turned on the revolutionaries. The police set on every demonstrator they could find. They arrested the entire staff of Charter 97, along with a thousand others. They marched Natalia Koliada to a prison van – ‘a kind of mobile jail’ – where they made her lie face-down. ‘It was dark inside, and I couldn’t see a thing. The guard said, “My only dream is to kill you; if you so much as move you’ll feel my baton all over your body, you animal.” Then he threatened to rape me.’ In every corridor of the jail they took her to ‘men were standing facing the walls with their hands behind their backs. It was like a scene out of films about fascism.’ Perhaps the regime did not realise that it had captured a prize target – either that or a KGB clerk bungled the paperwork. When they arraigned Koliada in court the next day, they charged her under someone else’s name with a minor offence. She escaped with a fine, and got out of the country.
They made no mistakes with Andrei Sannikov. The police picked him out at the post-election demonstration. They beat him with truncheons, and held the crowd back so it could not come to his aid. The KGB took his wife too, and once they were in jail they worked out a bestial way to destroy their sanity. The couple had left their three-year-old son with his grandparents. The police threatened to snatch the child and put him into state care, a tactic they had tried previously with Koliada’s twelve-year-old daughter.
When they sentenced Sannikov to five years’ hard labour for ‘organising mass disturbances’, spectators in the courtroom cried out, ‘Andrei, you are our president!’ Battered but dignified, Sannikov declared his support for democracy, the rule of law and enforceable international standards of behaviour from the dock: ‘We all want one thing – to live in our own country, participate in fair elections and not to fear for our lives or the lives of our loved ones. That’s exactly why we are being tried today, facing fabricated evidence from those who ignored the law. I want to warn all those who neglected the law today – you are bound to appear in court and incur deserved punishment. What’s worse – you will inevitably have to look into the eyes of your children.’
They will have to look into the eyes of their children. Whether they will receive the punishments they so well deserve is an open question, whose answer depends on political calculations. Will the growing economic crisis push the populace into revolt? Will Russia abandon its support for the dictator? Whatever scenario one imagines, it is hard to imagine the Net making a decisive difference. As in democracies, the new technologies do not just allow citizens of dictatorships to expand their knowledge. They also help the authorities control the population. With people as with cattle, electric fences can always contain them.
Welcome to Dystopia
An age of revolution provokes counter-revolution, as elites fight to hold on to power. Their success in crushing democratic movements ought to destroy the whimsical notion that technology determines political freedom. The Iranian and Belarusian regimes suppressed the opposition with the utmost brutality – and survived the revolt. The Syrian and Bahraini governments taught demonstrators that if they took to the streets they would kill them. In Libya, the revolutionaries required the support of the full force of NATO air power before they could overthrow the dictatorship. If in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood and the army unite to form a common reactionary front, the Egyptians will find that revolution has replaced a bad regime with a worse one – as the Russians found after 1917 and the Iranians after 1979.
Liberals have been able to use the Internet in the struggles of our time. Like the printing presses, it has opened novel possibilities. But the Net does not make democratic change inevitable, because liberalism’s enemies can use it as well. As with all other advances in communications technology, the Net adds to the influence of those who already possess it.
Dissidents in China, like dissidents in dictatorial regimes everywhere, welcome the Web. It allows environmental campaigns and protests against official incompetence that would once have been impossible – although it is worth noting that liberal bloggers avoid full-frontal attacks on the Communist Party.
The most popular sites in China offer entertainment, not politics, however, and the authorities see no reason to stop the masses losing themselves in escapism and fantasy. Overwhelmingly, those sites that cater for the niche current affairs market are not written by liberal bloggers, but by nationalists and authoritarian party-liners. They criticise the government not for denying human rights, but for not asserting China’s interests with sufficient ruthlessness. The most sinister sites target dissidents. When a professor complained that the cult of Mao in China venerated a tyrant, who killed more people in the twentieth century than any other dictator, the hard-line Utopia website responded by collecting ten thousand signatures demanding that the police prosecute him for subversion. Utopia called him a ‘capitalist running dog’, ‘cow ghost’ and ‘snake spirit’ – insults that outsiders found quaint but that Chinese readers recognised as anathemas the party used to describe Mao’s enemies when he began the massacres of the Cultural Revolution. Pro-regime websites, like pro-regime novelists, artists and journalists, face none of the harassment the state metes out to its political and religious opponents.
Liberals regarded China as an oddity after the fall of the Berlin Wall. History was over, and if the Chinese Communist Party wanted to continue to see its country grow, it would have to accept the democratic reforms that Westerners assumed the expanding middle class was bound to demand. When China grew into the world’s second largest economic power, without the middle class demanding or the Communist Party granting democratic reforms, the deterministic argument changed. The Internet would now undermine communist rule, and the rule of all other repressive regimes. If dictatorial states tried to restrict and censor it, they would see their economies shrink as open societies reaped the economic benefit of free speech in cyberspace. The crash of 2008 ought to have thrown a bucket of cold water over the excited futurologists. Open societies suffered far more than closed regimes. A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was entitled to wonder why Americans were telling him he must allow free speech when China was booming and the First Amendment had not stopped debt-laden America going through a deep recession.
On a technical level, controlling the Net caused the party few headaches. From the beginning, the Chinese state had been able to dominate the medium, shape its growth, control its structure and limit its users’ access to the rest of the world. With the cooperation of every large Western Web company except Google, China blocks the addresses of dissident sites or hijacks users’ sessions when they search for suspicious words – ‘Tibet’ and ‘Tiananmen’ to name two. The state requires online censors – ‘Big Mamas’ – to remove politically sensitive postings in chat forums. (The cosy name for the not-so-cosy job comes from the title Chinese families accord to the wife of the eldest uncle, who has the responsibility of guiding and taking care of everyone else.)
Net censorship in China and elsewhere is a private–public partnership. After human-rights groups accused the American communications corporation Cisco of helping China construct firewalls and keyword-searching facilities, a bland spokeswoman was entirely unconcerned. ‘Our customers determine the specific uses for the capabilities of these products,’ she said. The company was doing what all good businesses must do, and keeping the customer satisfied. When Google pulled out of China after it found that hackers had broken into dissidents’ accounts, presumably with state approval, no other Western technology company followed it. They were content to abide by the ‘pledge of self-discipline’ for the Chinese Internet industry, and to ‘refrain from producing, posting or disseminating pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability’ in return for the chance of making money. China licenses Internet service and content providers in the same manner that authoritarian seventeenth-century governments licensed printers. The effects are the same. An official for Sohu.com, a Chinese search engine and content provider, admitted in the early days of the Net that his company was ‘very much self-censoring’, and would not link to news that might anger the Party.
Attacks on the complicity of Western corporations with censorship came regularly from human-rights groups, and only Google took notice. How long Westerners will have even a minimal capacity to influence decision-making in China and other authoritarian states is open to doubt. Western dominance of the Net cannot last. The speed with which the Chinese economy is growing will ensure that new censorship technologies are developed in an environment where human-rights groups are banned rather than politely ignored.
Authoritarian regimes and organisations do not just censor the Net – they mine it for information. On a scale greater than any other communications technology, the Net offers states the power to spy and to entrap. A traditional secret service that wanted to watch a target could tap his phone and open his mail. The technology was cheap, but listening to every call and reading every letter required agencies to employ teams of eavesdroppers, at considerable expense. If they wanted to hear private conversations, they needed to break into homes and bug them, and send trained agents to shadow the dissident to discover the identities of his contacts.
Now they can simply watch how suspects use the Web. If they can hack into their accounts, they can access all their contacts by monitoring their emails, Facebook friends and Twitter followers. ‘Informants and covert surveillance are no longer required when we have vast databases, telecommunications companies, and Internet service providers who accumulate information on our political interests, hobbies, loves, hates, and fetishes,’ concluded one security specialist as he looked at the new possibilities opening up for intelligence-gathering. Information is not scattered around in dusty filing cabinets, but collected in easily accessible and searchable files. You might object that true underground dissidents would act like al Qaeda terrorists, and send encrypted emails. The main targets of oppressive regimes are not always psychopaths or potential revolutionary leaders, however. Ordinary citizens concern them as much. Letting them fear that they are under surveillance has as much of a chilling effect on their engagement in political debate as punishments for dissident writers. The knowledge that the state is watching you, or might be watching you, is a powerful deterrent against activism.
The misnamed ‘Twitter revolution’ in Iran displayed the oppressive power of the new technologies. The authorities posted pictures of protesters on the Net, and asked supporters of the regime to identify them and hunt them down. They used text messages and email to warn Iranians of the dire consequences of ‘being influenced by the destabilising propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating. In case of any illegal action and contact with foreign media, you will be charged as a criminal consistent with the Islamic Punishment Act.’ At Tehran airport, passport control questioned Iranians who were leaving the country – maybe to go into political exile – about Facebook, and went onto their pages to note down the names of their friends.
In Belarus the state’s agents have developed their own intimidatory techniques. They write threats beneath politically incorrect posts to spread fear, and act as agents provocateurs on the Web. ‘It’s very dangerous to be a blogger who writes against the regime,’ says Natalia Koliada. ‘The Belarusian regime has a special department of people who work at the KGB and Belarusian Republican Union of Youth to monitor the Net.’
Western companies that have supplied China with technology that can track dissidents justify themselves by saying that they sell the same technology to Western governments and organisations. Their implication that the power of the new surveillance technologies knows no borders is correct. In the free and unfree worlds alike, snoopers can accumulate information with a thoroughness that would have made their predecessors salivate.
A Janus-Faced Technology
Let a small incident, which seems trivial when set against the clashes in Belarus, China, the Arab world and Iran, illustrate the Janus-faced nature of the new technologies.
Paul Chambers worked in a car-parts factory in the north of England, and tweeted in his idle moments. His friends and the friends of a young woman from Northern Ireland overlapped. The two did not know each other, and lived far apart. They probably would never have met had not the social network brought them together. Their friends organised a Twitter party in a London pub to which everyone in the ad hoc network was invited. Boy met girl, and boy and girl liked each other very much. Chambers arranged to fly from Robin Hood airport in the East Midlands to see her in Belfast.
Technological advances allow sexual advances. The invention of the bicycle expanded the gene pool of many a remote region, as it allowed young men to cycle beyond their villages to find mates. In the 1950s, teenage couples appreciated the value of cars that took them away from their parents’ homes more than any other demographic. At times today, the sole point of the Web seems to be to allow the dissemination of pornography or, in the case of social network sites, the arrangement of assignations. Chambers was embarking on a romance that Twitter had nurtured and enabled. Just as previously isolated dissidents in Belarus, Iran, Russia, the Middle East and China found that the Web allowed them to make previously impossible connections with political sympathisers, so Chambers found that the Web allowed him to form a connection with a woman he would otherwise never have met.
The joy the Web spread appears plain. But consider the sequel. Before he flew to Belfast, Chambers saw a news report that snow had grounded all flights. ‘Robin Hood airport is closed,’ he tweeted. ‘You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’
I should not need to explain that he was joking; engaging in the mock-bombast people use in private conversation all the time. When a woman says to her friends, ‘I’ll strangle my boyfriend if he hasn’t done the washing up,’ or one man tells another, ‘I’ll kill my boss if he makes me work late and miss the match,’ they are not announcing a murder. The forces of law and order can rest easy. They do not mean it.
Staff at Robin Hood airport once had to patrol its precincts looking out for unattended baggage, and liaise with the police about credible terrorist threats. The Net gave them new sources of information, and they began to search Twitter for mentions of the airport’s name. When a manager came across Chambers’ tweet, he passed it to security officers. They saw no reason to panic. They realised that Chambers had not posted a ‘credible’ threat. But the procedures stated that every ‘threat’ must be referred up the line, and the airport staff had to obey orders.
A plain-clothes detective arrived at Chambers’ workplace and arrested him under anti-terrorist legislation. A posse of four more anti-terrorist officers was waiting in reception.
‘Do you have any weapons in your car?’ they asked.
‘I said I had some golf clubs in the boot,’ Chambers said. ‘But they didn’t think it was funny. I kept wondering, “When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?” Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched.’
The sight of detectives arresting Chambers scandalised his employers. They sacked him. The police realised that he wasn’t a terrorist, just a guy who wanted to see his girl. State prosecutors could not let the matter rest, however, and decided to charge him with sending menacing messages over a public telecommunications network, even though no one took the message seriously, and business had carried on at the airport as usual. The magistrate did not allow common sense to make one of its rare appearances in an English courtroom, and ordered Chambers to pay £1,000 in costs and fines.
Shaken but still determined to give the new relationship a try, Chambers eventually reached Northern Ireland. He and his new friend got on so well that he found work in Belfast and they settled down as a couple. But the case did not go away. The ham-fisted behaviour of the authorities caused outrage on the Web. Friends and strangers came together to urge him to appeal. The week before the case went back to court, he told his new employers in Northern Ireland that there could be renewed press interest in the bomb threat that never was when the hearing began. All they heard were the words ‘bomb’ and ‘threat’. They fired him too.
Paul Chambers’ story has become a cause célèbre in Britain, because it would once have been unimaginable for a man to lose two jobs for making one lame joke. Security guards at airports could not have listened in to the conversations of random members of the public who had given no reason to arouse suspicion, and would never have wanted to do so. Their employers would never have told them to hang around bars on the off-chance that they might hear someone say, ‘If it doesn’t get its shit together, I am going to blow the airport sky high,’ in a moment of mock rage. Security guards might have spent a lifetime eavesdropping and never heard the offending words uttered.
Suddenly, technology had made the impossible possible, and the possible has a nasty habit of becoming mandatory.
The blessings and curses the Net bestowed on Paul Chambers serve as a wider metaphor. The future may be one of greater information-sharing and informed collective action as people exploit new resources, or one of suspicion as people understand the growing likelihood of surveillance. What happens will depend on where you live, what rights you have, and how persistently you and your fellow citizens engage in political struggles to defend or expand those rights.
All new forms of technology change societies, but how they change them depends on the limits the politics of those societies set.
Democratic governments are the natural targets for Net activists. It is easier to find and publish information in free societies that offer legal protections for press freedom. Rights to trial by jury ensure that even those writers who have broken the law can be spared punishment if they have taken on the state in the public interest. Sensible jurors do not like their rulers getting ideas above their station, and will acquit the technically guilty rather than do the state’s bidding.
At the most basic level of protecting a writer’s personal safety, democratic countries offer a further advantage. If you steal hundreds of thousands of documents from the Russian state and put them online, the FSB will try to kill you. Steal American secrets, and the CIA will not.
This mismatch between the coercive powers of democracies and dictators produces many morbid symptoms. The most prominent is the tendency of democratic elites to succumb to dictator-envy. Rather than despising their opponents, they despise the free traditions of their own countries. How, they wonder, can their decadent, flabby, argumentative societies defeat an enemy who fights to win and lets nothing stand in his way? They think that they can beat their enemy by imitating him, and do not realise that when they become their opponents they defeat themselves. A craving by the US government to have the same ability Islamist militias and Saddam Hussein possessed to torture suspects and hold them outside the Geneva Convention is the shortest and best explanation for the moral and political disasters of extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo Bay.
On the left side of the argument, Western radicals fall for an equally inane error. Because it is easier to expose abuses of power in democracies, and because Western radicals are most concerned about abuses of power in their own countries, they assume that democratic abuses are the major or only abuses of power worth protesting about. Their parochial reasoning leads to the most characteristic of left-wing betrayals. Radicals either dismiss crimes committed by anti-Western forces as the inventions of Western propagandists or excuse them as the inevitable, if regrettably blood-spattered, consequences of Western provocation. The narcissism behind their reasoning is too glaring to waste time on. (In their minds, Western societies, their corporations and foreign policies remain responsible for the ills of the world half a century on from the end of colonialism. This myopic vision has the flattering consequence of making them – the brave Western opposition – humanity’s dearest friends, because they, and only they, can take on hegemonic power in its Western citadels.)
The duplicity the illusion sanctions ought to be a true cause for liberal guilt. Because they believe the real enemy is at home, Western radicals ignore the victims of dictatorial states and movements, and provide excuses for their oppressors. They see dissidents in countries like Belarus as tainted, because their sufferings cannot be blamed on the West. At their worst, Western leftists will follow through the logic of their position and collaborate with the oppressors.
Given the persistence of the old pathology, no one should have been surprised that the supposedly radical movement for Net ‘transparency’ turned on the victims of oppression.
Transparency purports to be a depoliticised ideal. Its supporters say they want information on what governments are doing and on who is trying to influence them. When they obtain it, they wish to use the Net’s processing power and crowd-sourcing techniques to root out corruption. On a more elevated level, they hope that transparency will create a more democratic system that enables citizens to participate in the decision-making of previously secretive bureaucracies, as governments put data on the Net and allow the public to analyse it. They do not say what decisions citizens should reach once they have the data. They do not discuss wider political questions – how should a good society share its wealth, deal with the rest of the world, protect its environment, care for its sick and educate its children? More pertinently, they reveal their privileged background by taking the democratic state for granted. They assume that the public they address is already living in a society where freedom of information and open government are at least possible, and spend too little time thinking about all those living in countries without democratic rights.
Transparency campaigners accept that their aims are narrow. They make a virtue of their limited and depoliticised ambitions by saying that all they are doing is ‘allowing people to make their own minds up’. They carry no responsibilities for what happens next. Outsiders can judge others by how they use the information they provide, but they cannot judge them. They are the enablers of debates. Where those debates go once transparency has been achieved, and what conclusions the participants reach, is no concern of theirs.
I do not mean ‘depoliticised’ as an insult, and there is much that is admirable about demands for transparency. Democracy and freedom of information go together, because if the electorate does not know what has been done in its name, it cannot pass a fair verdict on its rulers. Democracy’s advantage over other systems is that it allows countries to replace rulers without violence. But electorates cannot ‘throw the scoundrels out’ if censorship prevents them from learning that the scoundrels are scoundrels in the first place. The limiting of state corruption, meanwhile, is also an ambition that is beyond conventional politics, because it is a universal human aspiration that everyone who has experienced the insolence of office shares.
The emptiness of the transparency movement does not lie in its limited aims, but in the phoniness of its claim that it has escaped politics. WikiLeaks, the supposed source of sunlight for the twenty-first century, which ignorant celebrities and unprincipled activists instructed ‘everyone who believes in the power of transparency’ to ‘stand up for’, had a political programme that allowed it to intervene on the side of the world’s darkest forces. To quote him for the last time, the transparency movement amply proved the truth of Orwell’s remark that ‘So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.’
WikiLeaks could not leave the Belarusian dissidents alone. They did not fit into the narrow mentality of modern radicalism. The American and European governments offered the Belarusian opposition nominal support, as they offered support to the opponents of the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and other anti-Western dictatorships. To a certain type of Western radical, Belarusian dissidents were therefore suspect and tainted. They had collaborated with the great satan. They were not real dissidents at all. So, in Belarus WikiLeaks’ conduit was a believer in the fascist conspiracy theory who wished to help former communists fight the democratic opposition. Julian Assange’s chosen emissary was Israel Shamir, a renegade Russian Jew who converted to Greek Orthodoxy and embraced every variety of contemporary anti-Semitism. A French court convicted him in his absence of stirring up racial hatred. His published writing showed him to be a Holocaust denier who believed that a secret conspiracy of Jews controlled the world.
The dalliances of the ‘radical’ WikiLeaks with a proponent of neo-Nazi thought are not as surprising as they once would have been. If you believe that Western democracies are the sole or prime source of oppression, then you are wide open to the seduction of fascistic ideologies, because they come from a radical anti-democratic tradition that echoes your own. If you think that Israel or the West is the sole or prime source of conflict in the Middle East, your defences against anti-Semitism are down, and ready to be overrun.
Assange made Shamir WikiLeaks’ associate in Russia. Shamir gave the KGB in Belarus information it could use when he printed WikiLeaks documents that told the dictatorship there had been conversations between the opposition and the US. Shamir went to Belarus, praised the rigged elections and compared Natalia Koliada and her friends to football hooligans. Whether he handed over a batch of US cables without blacking out the names of Belarusian political activists who had spoken to American officials was an open question. The Russian Interfax news agency said Shamir ‘confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier’. The Belarusian state media added that he had allowed the KGB to ‘show the background of what happened, to name the organizers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones, without compromise, as well as to disclose the financing scheme of the destructive organizations’. Given Shamir’s record, it was prudent to fear the worst.
WikiLeaks said in public that Shamir had never worked for it, and that Assange and his colleagues did not endorse his writings. Privately, Assange told Shamir that he could avoid controversy and continue to assist WikiLeaks by working under an assumed name. When the BBC revealed Assange’s double-dealing, his lawyers accused it of using stolen documents to expose their client – a priceless accusation for the apostle of openness to level after he had received 250,000 stolen US cables.
WikiLeaks then sunk lower. For all my liberalism, I cannot think of one honourable reason why governments should not be allowed to keep information secret that might be used by the Taliban to compile a death list. Yet a death list was what the founder of WikiLeaks appeared ready to give men who would crush freedom of speech and every other human right. The US State Department cables Bradley Manning leaked to Julian Assange contained the names of Afghans who had helped allied forces fight the Taliban. One of the histories of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to a London restaurant in 2010. The Taliban had massacred religious minorities, murdered teachers for the ‘crime’ of teaching girls to read and write, and confined women to darkened rooms where passing men could not see them. Aware of its record, the reporters wondered whether Assange would endanger Afghans who had helped the Americans if he put their names online. ‘Well, they’re informants,’ he replied. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’
No man is under oath when the wine is flowing at a restaurant table. Assange denied at a public meeting that the conversation had taken place. His actions justified his assertions. Like a journalist who realises he has a moral obligation to protect confidential sources, he carefully suppressed documents that named Afghans the Taliban would want to kill. His decent behaviour did not last. In late 2011 WikiLeaks put all the US State Department cables on the Net, unedited, unredacted, with the names of better and braver people than Assange could ever be in Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia and Belarus for their dictatorial enemies to find and charge with collaboration with the US.
As I said at the beginning of this book, all the enemies of liberalism are essentially the same. Opposing them requires not just a naïve faith in technology, but a political commitment to expand the rights that we possess to meet changing circumstances, and a determination to extend them to the billions of people from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe who do not enjoy our good fortune.