Wikileaks without borders

It's been a while since we heard from Julian Assange. But there are also dispatches from Wikileaks on the nuclear disaster in Japan. And it's not just Facebook that is working in the Arab revolutions.

France's former foreign minister Védrine spoke of a "digital Big Brother", psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco feared the "tyranny of transparency". And former ambassador Elie Barnevi said that international relations would never be the same again. In the meantime, the outrage has largely subsided and Wikileaks has at least temporarily disappeared from the headlines - displaced by events in Japan and North Africa.

At the outbreak of the revolutions, the Christian Science Monitor mocked the idealization - in the West - of surfers in totalitarian countries: "They are stylized as the new Sakharovs, while the vast majority are content to consume moronic videos on YouTube." Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that Facebook allowed the fire ignited by a self-immolation in Tunisia to spread. The spark also spread beyond the borders. And in Tunisia, as in Egypt, the uprising was, if not triggered, at least spurred on by the news: Thanks to Wikileaks and its dispatches, the insurgents knew about the Americans' assessment of the regimes, who considered Mubarak's son to be incapable as a successor and would not necessarily support Ben Ali's mafia regime. Even though they are friendly states, bastions against Islamization.

Even before Wikileaks was nominated for the Nobel Prize, Jean-Christophe Rufin had already compared the organization to his "Doctors Without Borders", who had actually received it. Rufin was one of its founders thirty years ago. At that time, French intellectuals turned away from Marxism, founded the anti-totalitarian Enlightenment and developed the "duty to intervene", in the name of which the French have now become the avant-garde of the military operation against Libya. Today, the writer Rufin is a member of the Académie Française, and until recently he was the French embassy in Senegal.

"Doctors Without Borders" arose against the Red Cross: its neutrality and its advocacy of a right within war had made it an accomplice to barbarism in totalitarian societies. "Without borders" means: regardless of national borders and ideologies, victims have a right to help. Free citizens, informed by the press, must help. This concept prevailed and changed the face of war: "The world learned of the fate of the murdered" - Rufin recalls Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia.

With the success of the movement came the crisis. The humanitarians are now well organized and wealthy. The problem of independence also arises for them in view of the donors. They now base themselves on the law, whose transgression they had pursued. The concept of the duty to intervene has been instru¬mentalized by the United States to legitimize wars. Nowhere have the new humanitarians brought peace, overcome misery or prevented a climate catastrophe - the results are depressing.

Rufin speaks of a third generation of civil revolts. He includes radical ecology with animal liberation and the "virtual militantism" of Wikileaks. Transgression is becoming the rule. The use of violence, theft, systematic provocation, life in illegality - everything is justified by the cause. "Recognizing the context of developments does not mean condoning them," writes Jean-Christophe Rufin.

In totalitarian states, these civil revolts are welcome and legitimate. In Western societies, they have become the fifth estate in the state. They make governance impossible. They make reforms more difficult. But the justified publication of the Wikileaks leaks about the omerta in the Japanese nuclear industry shows that the boundaries are not so easy to draw. They will also fall. Jacques Attali, once a diplomatic advisor to Mitterrand and now a theorist of the virtual society, believes in freedom of thought as the last legitimate secret that can and must be defended: "No one should be forced to say what they think."