

Of Wikileaks and Literacy
The Secret Secret


This might initially sound a bit off. But as one of the fundamentals of literacy is access to literature, it is a serious problem for the scope of the classified universe is simply staggering yet, as begets secrecy, little known. "In fact," Harvard’s Peter Galison wrote in 2004, "the classified universe as it is sometimes called is certainly not smaller, and very probably much larger than [the] unclassified one." He continued, "the U.S. added a net 250 million classified pages [in 2003]. By comparison, the entire system of Harvard libraries?over a hundred of them?added about 220,000 volumes (about sixty million pages, a number not far from the acquisition rate at other comparably massive universal depositories such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, or the New York Public Library). Contemplate these numbers: about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet." Using Galison’s methodology, it would take the annual page count for all published titles (including new editions and reprints) in the U.S., United Kingdom, China, Russia and Germany – the nations with the five largest outputs of new titles totaling around 835,000 – to match that of the classified world in the U.S. alone.*




In his recent The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott notes, "[I]t should go without saying that until very recently the literate elite of the valley states were a tiny minority of the total subject population." He was referring specifically to Southeast Asia but the same is applicable, he notes, in "all premodern societies". Pre-modern literacy was overwhelmingly biased towards justifying state and clerical power or dictating its use. Military or labor conscription, holy texts governing the legitimate social and philosophical orders, descriptions of royal and clerical lineages, and census data and tax rolls dominated written texts until quite recently. The ability to develop, manipulate and interpret – and thus benefit from – these literate materials was in the hands of a tiny literate elite; "almost certainly less than 1 percent," according to Scott. For this reason attempts to expand literacy were attacked with the most severe punishments. Literacy had the potential to subvert such skewed power relationships by opening up the legitimate knowledge for public scrutiny.



When Secretary of State Colin Powell made the case to the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003 for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he invoked the power of access to the classified world. "I cannot tell you everything that we know," Powell stated, "but what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling." And despite his trust-me-I-have-the-goods declaration that "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," it has been definitively proven that the claims of Iraq’s weapons programs and the Hussein regime’s alliance with Al-Qaida were grossly exaggerated and falsified (here leaving aside the important question of whether such claims, if accurate, would then have justified war). As the other major agitator for the war, the United Kingdom offers analogous examples with Prime Minister Tony Blair pitching UK participation on the infamous September and Dodgy Dossiers.




Sec. of State Hillary Clinton has called the 29 November release of diplomatic cables "an attack on the international community." White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said the leaks "risk our ability to do our foreign policy". Gen. David Petraeus called the July release of tens of thousands of Afghanistan War documents "reprehensible". Adm. Mike Mullen said Wikileaks "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family". Sen. John Kerry called the release of diplomatic cables a "reckless action which jeopardizes lives" and Sen. Joe Lieberman called it "nothing less than an attack on the national security of the United States." New York Rep. Peter King went so far as to request the Obama administration "determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization" noting that it "presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States."

Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra called the Wikileaks release "a colossal failure by our intel community" and called for even more stringent and compartmentalized secrecy. Sec. Clinton "directed that specific actions be taken at the State Department, in addition to new security safeguards at the Department of Defense and elsewhere to protect State Department information so that this kind of breach cannot and does not ever happen again." In other words, the solution is a reaffirmation of state secrecy and its further entrenchment. State secrecy itself is not to be addressed. It is no exaggeration to parallel these reactions to the decisions to disinter Wycliffe’s remains and burn them at the stake, especially since the accusations of Wikileaks and Assange having "blood on their hands" have been definitively refuted. The breaching of secrecy has not led to physical harm any more than translating the bible into English led to the killings of the clergy. Clerical power was subverted. And now U.S. policy is being subverted.

One last basic element about state secrecy must be brought into question. Nothing, not even nuclear weapons research which is known as being "born secret", is secret before it, in idea or form, exists. That would be actual nonexistence whereas secrecy purports really existing things to be nonexistent. For this reason Galison titled his article "Removing Knowledge". He wrote, "Epistemology asks how knowledge can be uncovered and secured. Anti-epistemology asks how knowledge can be covered and obscured. Classification, the anti-epistemology par excellence, is the art of nontransmission." By obscuring literature on the volume it does, state secrecy begins an "illiteracization" of the populace. Removing and restricting knowledge creates literate and illiterate castes.** Illiteracization from state secrecy has dramatic consequences for our understanding, and thus shaping, of our own history. As Paglen wrote, "In terms of numbers of pages, more of our own recent history is classified than is not. … Our own history, in large part, has become a state secret."

It is common sense that some things must be kept secret for the greater good. Despite modern state secrecy being barely half a century old, this is deeply ingrained in the public mind. We accept it so unquestioningly that when Gibbs followed, "President Obama, as you know from the campaign, is a huge proponent of open and transparent government," with, "But clearly the revelation of 250,000 documents that are highly classified is dangerous and is a threat to our ability to conduct foreign policy," the obvious contradictions were not even jarring. So dominant is the positive narrative of state secrecy that such basic questions like, "If something is too dangerous or embarrassing to even talk about, perhaps we should not do that thing," seem starry-eyed and hopelessly naive. But that it is common sense does not mean it is good sense and when the volume of secret literature exceeds that of the transparent world it is a question that must be asked. This modern development of an exclusively literate caste holding ‘legitimate knowledge’ is, at best, a highly questionable outcome.


