Bradley Manning

The example of Bradley Manning underscores a current security reality, in which numerous actors generally have open access to secrets and could potentially leak them. As the number of witnesses to any classified information increase – and as these witnesses perceive a more generous transparently shared culture, OR as these witnesses perceive greater injustices in each cover-up – the risk of leaks increases. Repudiations for why leaking is unethical vary: it represents a breach of a code of conduct, that while transparency is admirable, leaking isn't itself transparent but “underhanded”; that it's immoral– seditious or unconscionable; that the appropriate channels (chain of command) are available to those seeking to address and redress wrongs and expose any crimes that may have been committed.

Is war possible in an age of yawning security and a greater proliferation of transparency and security-less networks? Do the advantages of wartime secrecy – that we know something the enemy doesn't and where these secrets constitution our sole advantage – exist in an age of total transparency? Could a transparent world eradicate the advantages of war and thus bring on the futility of war for all parties involved? Could a superabundant pervasiveness of transparency lead to the end of warfare?

Lenin and the Present Tense.

In the Translator's Notes to the 1991 version of Lenin's The State and Revolution, Robert Service posits that Lenin refers to Marx using present tense (his example is that Lenin frequently wrote "Marx writes") because "[Lenin] wanted to emphasize that Marx was no dead prophet in the eyes of Bolsheviks." I wanted to explore -- as I read the book -- different ways to interpret Lenin's use of present tense, particularly as it pertains to how many writers use Literary Present to establish immediacy rather than to deify historical actors and events. My theory is that Lenin, in mixing into his political tract both examples of formal and informal writing style (Service's Introduction, xxiii), wanted to have his reverence of Marx both ways too. In other words, Lenin uses Literary Present because he wants Marx to be both political and literary, an author in character; and he wants Marx to have the immediacy that Lenin's contemporaries perhaps seek to deny him (Marx).