Responses to WikiLeaks

The aftermath of the WikiLeaks saga hasn’t caused any major country-to-country relationship breakdowns. I guess that’s because most of the information has only been titillating, not surprising. After all, how many people are really surprised that that the Sunni Muslim countries want America to attack Shia Iran, to “cut off the serpent’s head” as the Saudi king put it?

The events following the leaks show the true face of European countries. Like Switzerland. Always happy to take money from every criminal, crook, murderer, swindler, drug lord and terrorist. But hey, Julian Assange puts the wrong city as his place of residence and the Swiss bank blocks the WikiLeaks account! Or take UK. They’d never extradite a terrorist out of their country, but Assange, now that’s different. The Brits are falling over themselves to extradite him for a sex crime! Australia, which would normally defend its citizens (including Assange), has suddenly developed “confidence in the British legal system.” Maybe the Aussies should invite the Brits back to rule them next!

Of course, the blame-America-for-everything brigade will say the US is arm-twisting Europe into doing all this. Yeah, of course, the Europeans could never do any evil, right? Forget imperialism, slavery, 2 World Wars and the Holocaust. Innocent Europe can do no evil.

The Russians and Chinese are having a field day pointing out how whistle-blowers about the government are persecuted in the West. Maybe they should all compare notes.

The Pakistani press has gone one step further. They have cooked up stories about what’s there in the WikiLeaks cables and declared there’s “proof” of Indian atrocities of every kind. Plus, they claim there’s “proof” in the WikiLeaks cables that the ISI is innocent of 26/11. The sites that have the entire WikiLeaks docs deny there’s any such doc. Who cares about the truth when you have declared yourself a pious nation?

Not much has come out about India yet. As one magazine put it: “The WikiLeaks revelations about Pakistan mostly just confirmed how both governments not-so-privately already feel about each other. In the case of U.S.-India relations, there's a lot more to lose.”

And now there’s the leak that the US ambassador to India called the Congress as resorting to “crass political opportunism” by trying to attribute 26/11 to Hindutva terrorists. But I guess that’s called “secularism” in the Congress manifesto.

Should be interesting to see what else comes out. After all, nobody could have gone through all 250,000 documents so fast. There are even dedicated sites that give a summary of the docs as they read them everyday. So you can go there daily to see if there’s a topic you like: for instance, see Foreign Policy magazine’s summary site.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more