When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.
- Arthur Miller
I was really disappointed that Time Magazine decided to ignore the overwhelming support from responders to their survey on who was the most influential person of 2010. The votes for Jullian Assange outnumbered the votes for the next two candidates on the list: Lady Gaga and the Prime Minister of Turkey, but instead the Times Editors selected Mark Zuckerburg who was something like tenth on the list.
I asked myself why would a magazine like the Times, well respected for their journalistic integrity, deliberately ignore overwhelming statistical evidence who their readers were interested in hearing about, and select someone who has been pedaling influence for years - like what is so bloody special about Mark Zuckerburg in 2010 (besides some movie appearing)?
It seems everywhere I look people are behaving irrationally about Wikileaks and Jullian Assange. So what the hell is going on? I finally realized we have a full blown 'moral panic' on our hands.
Let's stand back for a moment and forget what Wikileaks is, who Julian Assange is, or what they have done - those things for the moment are distracting details. Let's for the moment stand back and ask "what is happening to our society, our governments, our media, and our citizens, why are they all acting so irrationally, on all sides?"
Some insight can be gained by reading Stanley Cohen's "Folk Devils and Moral Panics."
What ever side of the cause célèbre of secrets you are on, what ever you read or what ever you say, just stand back and put it all in the context of moral panic. Who or what are we to believe when statements are made in this context?
Now there is a certain McCarthyism in the air these days and many people are afraid of sticking their neck out. For example, Columbia University were advising their students to stay clear of the Wikileaks stain lest it rub off on them and compromise their careers.
One can easily image that the Editor of Time Magazine felt equally threatened that by nominating Jullian Assange as most influential person of the year they might appear to be raising his celebrity in the world, and consequently celebrating terrorism. On the other hand Times has clearly nominated other devils such as Adolf Hitler, without fear of reprise. In the context of Moral Panic all I can really assume is that whatever public reasons the Times Editors gave for their selection, we will probably never learn their secret reasons, until someone leaks that some day.
To some extent terrorists and terrorism is becoming like a modern day Which Hunt. To be clear, there is terrorism in the world, and it is a hateful and cowardly way to spread one's political message, to simply to exact revenge, or otherwise satisfy a particular moral outrage. It is a really evil practice. But when pundits and politicians cry to declare Wikileaks a terrorist enterprise and Jullian Assange a terrorist, they are simply diluting the extreme nature of terrorism, and they are lobbying to take a legal framework that was intended for one thing, equivocate it to something else in their moral cross-hairs, and "set a certain murderous train in motion." In effect, those who unfairly or irrationally try to accuse others of being terrorists, are in fact themselves behaving like terrorists practicing their own form of terrorism, and are no different than those people who accuse others of being witches, heretics, or any other convenient political label to feed the Moral Panic.
Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor.
- deuteronomy 5:20
No comments:
Post a Comment