What’s new about WikiLeaks?Julian Assange
Published 14 April 2011
We shouldn’t be surprised by the war on WikiLeaks. The elite have always loathed the radical press, from English civil war news books to early American labour newspapers.
Once, at the time of a major popular upheaval, elites on different sides of the political divide feared the general population more than each other. The rising merchant classes may have opposed the more traditional, aristocratic nobility, but both sides feared the radical publishers who were stirring up the people past a point of no return. As one writer put it:
They have cast all the Mysteries and secrets of Government, both by Kings and Parliaments, before the vulgar (like Pearl before Swine), and have taught both the Souldiery and People to look so far into them as to ravel back all Governments, to the first principles of nature. They have made the People thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.
Although these words could easily describe the situation today in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, they were in fact written in 1661, by a man called Clement Walker, about popular radicalism at the time of the English civil war in the 1640s.
This was a crucial time in the history of publishing - and the history of governments' attempts to control what the people could read. Printing presses, invented two centuries earlier, were becoming more accessible, and the first newspapers were appearing throughout western Europe as a result of the creation of a postal system. Today's maxim, "technology drives distribution", has long antecedents.
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