David Seaton's picture

    Wikileaks (my latest theory)

    By David Seaton on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 4:09pm |

    After my waltzing around ever so long with trying to figure out who's behind Wikileaks, the penny finally dropped. It is so glaringly obvious to me now, that I'm surprised it never occurred to me before. The good news is that it isn't Israel.

    (Hillary) Clinton likened online censorship by countries such as China, Vietnam and Iran to the rise of communist Europe, warning that a new "information curtain" threatened to descend on the world unless action to protect internet freedoms was taken. Her comments, which mark the Obama administration's first major foray into foreign policy online, come at a delicate time for relations between the US and China. Guardian, 01/21/2010

    The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.” That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States. New York Times 12/04/2010

    Kill with a borrowed knife (借刀殺人／借刀杀人, Jiè dāo shā rén) Attack using the strength of another (in a situation where using one's own strength is not favourable). Trick an ally into attacking him, bribe an official to turn traitor, or use the enemy's own strength against him.

    Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree (李代桃僵, Lǐ dài táo jiāng) There are circumstances in which you must sacrifice short-term objectives in order to gain the long-term goal. This is the scapegoat stratagem whereby someone else suffers the consequences so that the rest do not. 36 Strategems
    Cutting to the chase: my theory is that Chinese intelligence is behind all of this... just to see how we like some of our own medicine... a "(fill in the color) Revolution" for the USA.

     

    The US government and thinktankery in general have been treating Internet as if it was America's "secret" or not so secret weapon to weaken the Chinese leadership's power. Wikileaks proves that America's "regime" is as, or more, vulnerable than China's to the dissolvent of uncontrolled information.

     

    Julian Assange is China's answer to the Dalai Lama and this year's Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

     

    Do I think that Julian Assange knows that he is being used by the Chinese?

     

    Of course not. it would be essential for them to keep him totally in the dark. At some point or another American authorities are going to interrogate Assange and whoever is behind him wants the buck to stop right there.  Assange has been put into to play to carry the can. I'm sure that whoever is China's man in the operation has impeccable cover and morphology to avoid suspicion. 

     

    Assange talks and acts like the leader of a religious sect similar to the one led by his mother's old guru, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Manipulating someone like that into thinking that every idea in their head originated in their head is surprisingly easy. Certainly the Chinese are devious and patient enough (read Sun Tzu) to groom Wikileaks and Assange for years waiting to spring him. The fact that some of the cables are unflattering to China's leadership increase their appearance of innocence.

     

    Up till now the Chinese have been playing defense, putting up their "Great Fire Wall" and stealing Google's source code, with Wikileaks they are now on the offense.


    Certainly, if the Chinese are not behind all of this they can only be grateful for it. They are said to be compulsive gamblers, obsessed by luck. If they are innocent of Wikileaks they should at the very least burn a few joss sticks to Cai Shen, the Taoist god of fortune.

    Cross posted from http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

    Comments

    But.. but.. He seems so - French.  What about Julia Child? She seemed kinda French and worked for the OSS but was she a double agent too? Her recipies seem on the up and up.  I'm glad I didn't look at any of the WikiLeaks stuff and not just because I want to work for the Post Office* some day.  It is all just too confusing.

     

    *In 1969 after two years in the U.S. Army I took a job at the Post Office.  I was required to sign a loyalty oath as part of my application for the job.  The more things change ...


    by LarryH on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 4:32pm

    Humm...sounds like blaming everything on the atom bomb. A popular sport during the 1950s and 60s. "Cat had kittens - atom bomb. Sure is cold - atom bomb. Aunt Sara's bunions are acting up. - atom bomb. The Beatles are number 1 in the charts this week again. - atom bomb."


    by cmaukonen on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 4:34pm

    Ahhh! The devious Orientals! Well spied!!

    Though I remain confused on one small point. Would you say the Chinese are more the "inscrutable " and "implacable" types whose bottomless patience enables them to play the long-game...  or more the "compulsive gambler" type, willing to take their chances with Lady Luck? 

    Whichever it is, let's just hope the Jews don't ever team up with these guys. *shiver*

    - End Seatonesque "analysis."

    - Begin sighing.


    by quinn esq on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 5:01pm

    comment removed by a shallow body of water


    by moat on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 8:11pm

    Love it. 

    "It's a thing."


    by quinn esq on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 8:22pm

    I guess I can file "the Chinese are obsessive gamblers" right next to Jew fatigue.

    I'm sure that whoever is China's man in the operation has impeccable cover and morphology to avoid suspicion.

    When he isn't compromising his impeccable intelligence gambits with his obsessive gambling habits that is.

    I hereby nominate David Seaton for the title of "DagBlog's Crazy Uncle."


    by DF on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 6:35pm

    Seconded. 

    "All in favour say BBHSHSHBTOPPRFBPGOPFPOFBN."


    by quinn esq on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 7:56pm

    All I want to know is what I am suppose to do when he has too much eggnog at the family holiday gathhering.


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 12:25am

    I guess I can file "the Chinese are obsessive gamblers" right next to Jew fatigue.

    Oy I didn't even notice that, I guess I am so fatigued by David Seaton's continual and often ridiculous cultural stereotype generalizations that I just gloss right past them now.....


    by artappraiser on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 12:57am

    Ah, hell; can't you add back Mossad into the mix?  I read this morning that the Birthers believe Mossad's behind Assange and the leaks, and we coulda pictured you with, ya know, Orly Tate kinds o' folks, say at Fancy Dress balls where ya all wear Mausers and eyepatches and such... 

    This is a new take, David, on "Mao-ie Wowie!"  Congratulations. 


    by we are stardust on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 6:43pm

    All right. You have me rolling. Good stuff here. A few things to bear in mind:

    #1: The way Wikileaks does things they have no clue where the material comes from. It's a double-blind system based on bit-scattered anonymous proxies (incidentally designed by the same people who've been engineering solutions to safely let folks get info out of Iran and China). That's the whole point. You can leak to Wikileaks and it doesn't matter how much they get tortured - Wikileak staff has no idea where the data came from. Their role is simply to verify authenticity.

    #2: You are barking up the wrong tree assuming one source having leaked information would necessarily exonerate a second potential leaker. Any number of people with an agenda could feed Wikileaks documents - and as long as they are legit, Wikileaks would be expected to release them. The quality of this as a policy is open to debate, but that's how they operate (it's basically how the "legitimate" press operates as well, BTW).

    #3: Wikileaks and Assange are members of a larger open-info community that already share an ideology. For the most part they are in an actively adversarial relationship with the nation of China. Your idea that China has been grooming Wikileaks would imply China has been supporting the very same technologies being used to circumvent their own firewalls. Assange is the guy on TV but there are some pretty legendary names who've contributed to the anon tech they are using - with quite a lot of cross-pollination to the other projects. Though not impossible, China's long-term involvement seems like a pretty big stretch.

    What if Wikileaks is just a group of techies who believe in helping people get out documents about public entities - governmental or corporate? What if the data just came from a handful of Americans in various roles of government seeing no recourse up the chain of command and no support within the traditional journalism industry who finally decided the mess was so screwed up that showing anyone in America who cares to look where we are at and letting the chips fall where they may was the only reasonable course of action? As we're weighing theories, isn't that at least within the realm of possible?

    Agreed though, regardless if the Chinese are behind it - it still plays into their hands pretty well in some regards.


    by kgb999 on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 7:35pm

    Hey, no fair deploying actual facts about Wikileaks!  That really spoils the whole speculation party.


    by DF on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 7:52pm

    You DO know you're on double secret probation?


    by quinn esq on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 7:57pm

    they are in an actively adversarial relationship with the nation of China

    Uh huh. A related comment on David's last conspiracy thread:


    Julian Assange says WikiLeaks wants to expose China and Russia as much as US,

    guardian.co.uk, Thursday December 2 2010

    In interview, Assange denies US focus and says WikiLeaks can be force for opening up closed countries like China and Russia

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/02/julian-assange-wikileaks-chi...

    Edit to add: I fully expect you to pick this apart for clues to his supposed puppet masters, since of course, as with all conspiracy theorists, the person cannot possibly mean what he says...[....]


    regardless if the Chinese are behind it - it still plays into their hands pretty well in some regards.

    However, we've only seen a tiny portion of the documents so far and there seems to be little rhyme or reason in the chronology of publication/release as to region/problems.

    (Excepting that it seems sorta clear to me that the Guardian and the Times made a priority for themselves in looking for Iran stuff as that was mainly what was published the first few days. And I for one don't assign any nefarious motives to the latter; if I were an international desk editor/journalist, the Iran stuff is what I'd probably want to see first, too, simply because it's been the hardest story to get straight answers on from all sources/parties involved.) We don't know everything that's in there about China yet; not much on China yet that I could see except as regards Iran. But pre-release there was quite a bit about Hillary making it a priority to apolgize in advance if I recall correctly, fearing some bad repercussions apparently.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 10:43pm

    David, I do see why the Chinese would want to blunt our diplomatic missions and blue water Navy but I think they'd be leery of hurting our ability to repay all our loans. It is tempting to think the Chinese would like to use our open society against us, but even if they could control it, WikiLeaks seems to be an imprecise tool.


    by Donal on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 8:02pm

    David, the wiki-leaks cable dump is a Chinese diversionary tactic. Their real attack is on Spanish debt, which the Chinese are shorting like crazy. By driving down bond prices and forcing interest rates up, Spain will need a cash infusion beyond what the EU can provide. And which is the only nation with enough cash to do that? China. But just before they give them the cash they will cover their shorts. Man are those guys savvy! They will have bought half of Spain using nothing more than a bank of computers, and made a profit on the bonds.  But you were somewhat on target about what the Chinese are up to.   


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 10:11pm

    And they have invaded your blog. Seriously,MAO, he alternately smiles, sneers, etc. How do they do that?


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 10:22pm

    OK, it was me. I leaked the cables. I'm trying to destabilize the world order so that I can stage a coup in the United Nations and become Mr. Universe for Eternity. So sue me.


    by Michael Wolraich on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:06pm

    I thought so. All pledge loyalty to mighty Genghis. How'd' you get Mao's lips to move?


    by Oxy Mora on Sun, 12/05/2010 - 11:45pm

    I'm trying to destabilize the world order so that I can stage a coup in the United Nations and become Mr. Universe for Eternity.

    Well that would certainly explain your user name.Smile


    by artappraiser on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 12:18am

    My lawyer is a Chinese Jew.  Do you think there will some kind of conflict of interest?


    by Elusive Trope on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 12:27am

    I am in awe of the Chinese. I think Napoleon's famous phrase, "Let China sleep for when she awakes, she will shake the world" is an understatement. I was probably the youngest kid in greater Chicagoland (11yrs) to read the Tao Te Ching and it changed my life. I started reading Sun Tzu during the war in Vietnam because it was said that general Giap did. I continue to read it, I only wish I could read it in Mandarin. Sun Tzu is to Clausewitz like Einstein is to your high school science teacher. To understand the metamorphosis of the Chinese Communist Party without having studied those texts would be impossible... that and the thought of Mao Zedong, of whom Deng Xiaoping said, "Mao 30% bad, 70% good and I am fascinated by how Chinese traditional Chinese philosophy was able to incorporate Hegel and Marx into their canon. And how something as seemingly esoteric as the thought of Lao Tze can be applied with immense effect to loosening the grip of a dominating power (USA) on China's future.

    Frankly I think China is going to take world dominance away from the USA like taking candy from a baby and without firing a shot.

    So, my intuition that China is behind Wikileaks stems from my reading of Sun Tzu and my admiration for the superiority of their culture to ours. I imagine that they are already reading most of America's electronic signals and they needed something like Wikileaks to cover their tracks.


    by David Seaton on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 3:45am

    I am fascinated by how Chinese traditional Chinese philosophy was able to incorporate Hegel and Marx into their canon.

    Seeing as how China is fully integrated into the network of financial capitalism , does that mean these philosophers have also absorbed John Calvin and Milton Friedman? 

    I bet their brains hurt. I know their knees must since most of the those "philosophers" were sent to labor camps during the Culutral Revolution. When you assert that classical Taoism has somehow been incorporated into the "metamorphosis of the Chinese Communist Party, do you have any way of demonstrating it? Or is the perception a kind of gestalt that disappears at the contact of analysis?

    Speaking of culture, your reference to the "superiority of their culture" reminded me of Hegel's less flattering take on it. I present it as a sort of cautionary tale against using the phrase:

    This is the character of the Chinese people in its various aspects. It's distinguishing feature is , that everything which belongs to Spirit-unconostrained morality, in practice and theory, Heart, inward Religion, Science and Art properly so called- is alien to it. The Empreror alway speaks with majesty and paternal kindness and tenderness to the people; who, however, cherish the meanest opinion of themselves, and believe that they are born only to drag the car of Imperial Power. The burden which presses them to the ground, seems to them to be their inevitable destiny; and it appears nothing terrible to them to sell themselves as slaves, and to eat the bitter bread of slavery. Suicide, the result of revenge, and the exposure of children, as a common, even daily occurrence, show the little respect in which they hold themselves individually, and humanity in general. And though there is no distinction conferred by birth, and everyone can attain the highest dignity, this very equality testifies to no triumphant assertion of the worth of the inner man, but a sevile consiousness-one which has not yet matured itself so far as to recognize distinctions.

    From Philosophy of History, Part 1, Section 1

     


    by moat on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 10:30am

    Their obsession is to regain the preeminent position of total sovereignty that they enjoyed before the industrial revolution and western imperialism humiliated China.They were looking through western thought to find something they could use.  Hegel's dialectic, which Marx "turned upside down" was found congenial to their Taoist mentality and so is Lenin's version of it.  Because of the ideological and propaganda struggle of the Cold War we have endowed the idea of capitalism with certain moral and platonic qualities that it doesn't really possess; the Chinese see this more clearly than we do. For them it is merely a tool, "black cat, white cat" Deng Xiaoping said. Deng also said, that anyone who practices capitalism in China can get rich and anyone who talks about capitalism can go to jail. capitalism is an "energy" "qi or Chi" that the Leninist PCC is using to develop China. The protagonist is the party. Using this tool, they now have the US economy more or less at their mercy. That is pure Sun Tzu, but Lenin would have appreciated it too, I think.


    by David Seaton on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 3:03pm

    The texts that refer to living according to the Tao do not encourage the notion of seizing political power on the basis of a stated goal that a large number of people have agreed to beforehand.

    When you say "They were looking through western thought to find something they could use." Are you suggesting Mao and his followers were pretending to be Communists committed to completely replacing an existing culture of production and exchange but were actually preserving traditional culture and secretly reconstituting the Empire?

    If that is your argument, something more than simply repeating your thesis is needed if the notion is to be more than a reading of tea leaves. At the very least, you might acknowledge that there are reasonable points of view that do not share your vision.

     


    by moat on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 10:29pm

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