ISSUE #96: Government secrecy needs to end.
What makes the government the most powerful entity in any country? Because they convince the public that they need the government to live in a better, thriving, and peaceful society. Then the question arises, how do they convince the public to believe that? One of the tools they have in their arsenal is what they call “classified information.”
“Classified information” is just another way of saying “the information that may prove to be inconvenient for the powerful if exposed.” That’s what it really is. They talk a lot about how government obfuscation is necessary to maintain national security, but history has shown that it’s more about political security than it is about national security.
“The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.” - Julian Assange, the person who is behind the bars for exposing the information that didn’t threaten the national but political security.
In a saner world, the amount of power you have would be inversely proportional to the amount of privacy you get. Governments, media, and plutocrats of that world would have the least privacy, while the people having the most. But the world we live in is as saner as the water is dry. It has legalized privacy for the powerful, i.e. for the people or organizations whose decisions affect the entire planet, and illegalized privacy for the least powerful, i.e. the working class. It throws people in jail for exposing their government’s private crimes and those who wish to live a private life are suspected at best and thrown in jail at worst.
Do you feel how crazy it sounds that we have not only given them the highest amount of power, but also the right to keep things hidden from us and let them call us “conspiracy theorists” when we demand to look behing the wall of opacity?
Even if for one day, people are allowed to see what their governments have been doing in the name of…. whatever, that one day will be the most revolutionary of all time. Because nobody wants to live in a world where the people who were given the power to serve the people and protect the planet are exactly the ones who disserve the people and destroy the planet. That’s why they pour so much energy and money to make sure that never happens.
If that happens, people would wait for not even a second to overthrow the current system of government secrecy and propaganda, and we would organically create a world that treats everyone equally, and provides for everyone according to their needs. Advocating for government transparency is a political position in and of itself.
The only difference between a left-winger and a right-winger is the way they both perceive the world in front of them. I’m not saying there’s anything bad in holding a political position, but if you advocate showing people the reality that’s currently hidden from them, they can organically develop a system that none of us can even imagine as of now.
Being a proponent of government transparency means:
you do everything according to your ability to put light on the areas that your government wants to keep hidden in the darkness.
you support whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.
you support Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.
you support anyone who does anything to make government transparency a thing.
you oppose the mainstream media having all the power to shape the dominant narratives.
you oppose the internet censorship; which is a way for keeping the inconvenient information away from the mainstream public consciousness.
you oppose any form of propaganda, even if it benefits you.
Sure, having no secrecy at all would make going into government unappealing for many. Don’t you think that’s how it should be? When you know that your evil deeds can be instantly seen by the public, your focus would be not on doing evil things to maintain control over public, but on public service to win the trust of the public.
As long as we are not allowed to see what the elected officials are doing behind the curtain; as long as anyone who says something critical of government obfuscation is smeared; as long as anyone who dares to remove the curtain is thrown in the prison cells, the people will never feel the need to rebel against the system of corruption, crime, exploitation, ecocide, nuclear brinkmanship, and torture.
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