New Zealand is a democratic country, we are given a choice and we vote. Australia is also a democratic country, as is America and 117 other countries in the world.
There are three meanings of the word democracy on Dictionary.com.
1. Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
2. A state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
3. A state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.
Now the first and the third definitions are the most important. (Although it is amusing to see that they give the US as an example.) For a start, if the supreme power is vested in the people why is it that in 2005 a Washington Post poll found that 52% thought that the Iraq war made them no safer, and 6 out of 10 thought it was not worth fighting at all. And yet, they were still at war until 2010.
If the people were over it, to put it colloquially, then why were they still there? It’s not like people weren’t protesting. There were even protests in 2002, prior to the start of the war.
Wikileaks is all about the democracy. They don’t care if you’re President, if you’re Secretary of the State, if you run the CIA. They just want to keep you in check. Because apparently, without embarrassing these leaders by stealing their secrets from under their nose and publishing them for the whole world to see, they just don’t listen to the people.
And what right do these leaders have in keeping secrets? In a true democracy, we should technically all be in government and there would be no secrets. Without secrets the people can make truly informed decisions about who they think should be in government.
And that’s what scares them.
References:
Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane. The Washington Post. (2005). Poll Finds Dimmer View of Iraq War. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/07/AR2005060700296.html
Dictionary.com. (2011). Democracy. Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/democracy
3 comments:
It's clear that wikileaks is a topic that is widely debated. But you make very good points in favour of it. Very well-worded and clear.
Hi Vex,
This is GOOD introduction. I believe that it's not easy to have a balance between right to know and government.
Wikileaks has tried to reveal the truth to some extent, but sometimes maybe overstepping the mark of what is good information for public exposure and what is not.
Hey Bex, valid points. Not easy justifying Julian Assange's actions. But you did it.
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