Julian Assange and his Many Leaks

I have been thinking, if you are an extremist in any thing you do, politics, life, food, movies whatever....it would be really hard to accuse you of being a hypocrite. It's easier to label those who seek the middle or seek a compromise of being hypnotics. One thing purist and extremists have in common is that they are true to what they believe, they do not fudge. Look at Europe for example, they were all about Free Speech and you can argue they had the freest society, up until they started rightfully to exclude questioning or denial of the holocaust. They compromised, now what do you get? the Muslims in Europe were not amused when Europe refused to condemn the prophet Muhammad cartoons. They can rightfully argue the principle of the utility of the freedom of speech. Had the Europeans not compromised and limited freedom of speech, it would be hard to criticize them.

now here me out, here is what I am trying to get at from Raw Story:

On the same day that British authorities arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on an Interpol warrant, the US State Department announced it would be hosting the United Nation's "World Press Freedom Day" next year

See now many can say the US state Department is being hypocrites with their behavior, in one hand they want to contain the freedom of speech in the case of the leaks. And on the other they boast around the world (mostly to third world countries) about how awesome the press in America and how free they are (which is true ) I know those are different things, but had the US sicked to the purist approach and took their freedom of speech protection far, they would not come across as speaking from both sides of their mouths. i know the US believes in freedom of the press, I see it everyday. But to the outside, it would look really bad, becasue once is too many times. you either stand for freedom of expression, or you do not. No buts and not ifs.....that's how you disarm your opponents. Now repressive regimes will point to this Wikileak incident and tell their people, "See they do not like freedom of Speech" and that will endanger US allies who have been using the West and the US as an explain of how to do things. Those allies have enough challenges, they do not need to defend the US' stand on Freedom of expression, that's not their fight.

Often when a repressive regime does not like some figure and they want to discredit them and eliminate their threat. They would accuse them with a moral (often sex) crimes to drive a rift between them and the common man by doing this character assassination (I remember a couple of cases that took places), if not then intimidate those unwanted figures, and if all fails send them to jail. I cannot help but notice that this case of the Wikileak founder, the West actually learned something from dictators instead of teaching them how to do something, the West is borrowing a page from the undemocratic regimes text book. It does not matter what I know, what matters is how things look from the outside to the rest of the World. It does not look good people. While many individuals living around the world do not really follow what the leaks are about, (there is little or no earth shattering details) many do not really care about it, but the reaction matters....in this case I think it made it worse.

At least dictators and extremists are rarely accused of hypocrisy when it comes to principles of not having free press.