THE WILD HOLIDAY

 

I painted a dirty word on your old man's Mercedes-Benz,  
Cause you told me to do it.
Yeah I got busted, but soon they released me cause the cops were sad, 
and they didn't know how to prove it.

Wikileaks has published only a small fraction of the cables. So they are engaged now in a great "strategic" deployment of information. How exciting! We can dismiss the happy slur of anarchy. These people are not anarchists.

The reasons ultimately aren't very important; these clowns may recognize that the spectacle can only handle a specific amount of factmorsels at a time -- or they may be "analyzing" the data, etc, or keeping certain items in reserve, for their sexy qualities, as a time bomb; Or maybe they just don't have anything left that rises above the usual. The fact is they are withholding their semi-precious information, and at worst are functioning as state agents, and at best, enjoying their 15 minutes as Moral Scolds to the Universe.
The upshot of this seems obvious. They are no doubt primarily concerned with branding and they are behaving no differently than a traditional media outlet. The longer you play the insider Game of the Cherrypick the more corrupting it is, eventually you won't be able to convince anyone, even a cretin with a college degree in political science, that you are on the outside of the process.

Ellul: Authoritarian regimes know that people held very firmly in hand need some decompression, some safety valves. The government offers these itself. This role is played by satirical journals attacking the authorities, yet tolerated by the dictator, or by a wild holiday set aside for ridiculing the regime, yet paid for by the dictator (Friday of Sorrows in Guatemala) Clearly, such instruments are controlled by the regime.

These instruments of criticism serve to consolidate power and make people cling even more to the regime by providing artificial release of tendencies that the state must keep in check. In such situations, propaganda has an almost therapeutic and compensatory function.