How I love Wikileaks

By Michael J. Smith on Sunday February 26, 2012 10:12 PM

So there's this private intelligence firm called Stratfor, and Wikileaks has gotten hold of a big cache of their internal emails and put them up on the Web:

http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html

It makes fun reading. One doesn't really know whether to be more impressed by how sinister it is -- these creeps are apparently all over the place -- or how clownish it is: lots of swagger and tough talk, and at bottom a lot of inane thumbsucking, worthy of a Trotskyite email list, over material discovered in the newspaper or picked up as gossip from some guy in a bar. I've seen one so far that reads as if it actually rested on real conversations with Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, and Nicholas Brady:

http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/5509401_re-insight-for-internal-use-only-on-pain-of-agony-.html

... but who knows? This could be fourth-hand gossip. (Stratfor is much given to the puerile habit of top-posting, so you have to start at the bottom of these chains and read up.)

There's definite personality type involved here. I bet a lot of 'em played Dungeons & Dragons at an impressionable age; the one guy I actually know who works for the CIA certainly did. He loves to strike the if-I-told-you-I'd have-to-kill you note, but has the giveaway kinked neck, Blackberry squint, and dyspeptic pallor of the cubicle rat. Email virility.

Comments (3)

sk:

They're seeking thrills, just like the greatest generation of he-men did.

Op:

That italic clip isn't up to.your usual standard of corrosive satire SK


Looking for the next Benito u may miss the next Reagan orThatcher


Reaction here at Metropole UNO

Comes on little clay feet


sk:

The vetting elites here are made of sterner stuff than decadent German or Italian bourgeoisie in the aftermath of defeat and depression. What makes you think Lina's clip refers only to those two upstarts who make the freaks gathered for Republican primaries appear statesmanlike? Benedetto Croce wanted the 21 years of Mussolini to be wished away as an "ellipsis" and Germans have made a fine art of bracketing away the 12 year long Reich as an aberration. But, such excision is not as neat and tidy as many would like:


...[T]he exacerbated nationalism and biological racism of the Nazis were closely linked to the culture and practice of imperialism that had characterized the whole of Europe since the beginning of the 19th century. Germany had not played a leading role in this development. On the contrary, it was a latecomer, a keen pupil following the two great colonial powers, France and Britain. The natural supremacy of the white race and its corollary, Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa and Asia; the view of the world beyond Europe as a vast area to be colonised; the idea of colonial wars as conflicts in which the enemy was the civilian population of the countries to be conquered, rather than an army; the theory that the extinction of the inferior races was an inevitable consequence of progress: these central tenets of Nazi ideology were commonplaces of 19th-century European culture.

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