The WikiLeaks and Religion

Amplify’d from www.statesman.com

The WikiLeaks and Religion

By Joshunda Sanders

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks have gotten a lot of attention, and I’ve been following a bit of the stir over the sexual assault allegations against him. Just a few of the stories I’ve read about the cables have focused on religion, but I thought they were interesting. One of them mentioned the Vatican’s communication flaws, as reported by the Religion News Service: The cable was written amid heated controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to readmit an ultra-traditionalist bishop who turned out to be a public Holocaust denier. Benedict himself has called the move a mistake and a failure in “public relations.” The Vatican lacks any “comprehensive communication strategy,” wrote Julieta Valls Noyes, the No. 2 official at the U.S. embassy to the Holy See in a February 2009 cable back to Washington. Noyes characterized the Vatican’s approach to public relations as a “hit-or-miss proposition,” and said “decision making” is divorced from “public spin.” The result, she wrote, is that the “church’s message is often unclear.” Events over the intervening two years show that not much has changed. The story goes on to point to news stories underscoring the Vatican’s response to excerpted comments about condom usage to prevent HIV/AIDS from Pope Benedict XVI’s “Light of the World” - a book-length interview with Peter Seewald that I just finished. It’s worth noting that the Vatican has been clarifying the Pope’s comments for almost a month it seems, but maybe this week’s clarification will be the last one for awhile. The other significant religious cable appeared last week. Last Friday, the London Guardian published a piece about comments from the Dalai Lama on climate change: The Dalai Lama, according to the latest release of WikiLeaks cables, told US diplomats that, for Tibet, climate change is a more urgent issue than a political settlement. This will certainly dismay some of the more radical elements of the region’s independence movement. Many of the younger Tibetans in exile are already frustrated with their spiritual leader’s moderate and non-violent approach. For them, independence will always trump the environment. Beyond these, I wonder if there have been other WikiLeaks cables that have also had long-reaching religious implications that I missed? There is a story to be told, I think, about the faith of Assange, if he has one, and where he stands on the moral implications of his actions. To many, he seems like a hero and is being pursued like a martyr. I’d like to know more about what shaped him. There are glimpses of that in a New Yorker profile from June, but just glimpses — the profile has lots of other good details about Assange developing as a hacker from a young age, but the only other mention of his history with any kind of faith (besides the passage below) has to do with his mother’s ex-boyfriend who was part of a cult: He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare. Read more at www.statesman.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/jj50