American officials are howling like stuck pigs because of Wikileaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables, an act which they say upsets "delicate" negotiations and relations.
In fact, the Wikileaks’ release of the secret cables is a revolutionary blow against the whole edifice of imperialist wheeling-and-dealing behind the backs of the world’s peoples, a blow against the secret planning for war, death and destruction.
What exactly is the rationale given by the United States and other governments to keep such matters secret from its own people?
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There’s a long history here. In World War I there were rumored to be "secret treaties" between the imperialist blocs in which the powers agreed to carve up the world according to their economic interests, in direct violation of the various peoples’ aspirations for national independence and democracy. The imperialists did not want to discuss matters openly because that would belie their false slogans about "democracy" which were the slogans for war. Hence secrecy was vital for the imperialists.
U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who liked to posture as the advocate for all the little nations being trampled on by the old European imperialists, issued his "Fourteen Points" to a joint session of Congress in January 1918, laying out the principles which were supposed to be the basis for the coming peace. The first point famously read:
"Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
Of course, there was a full measure of hypocrisy in Wilson’s democratic pretensions, as the U.S. was already building its own colonial empire, starting with militarily seizing Cuba and the Philippines in 1898-1902, and engaging in bloody military suppression of guerrilla liberation movements in both countries. Wilson himself sent troops in to occupy Haiti in 1915, and they remained there until 1934.
Wilson’s hypocritical statement of principles for peace was actually an attempt to steal the thunder from the revolutionary Bolshevik government in Russia, which had shook the imperialist diplomatic world by overthrowing the Tsar in November 1917. As part of fulfilling their revolutionary promise, the new Bolshevik government peremptorily published all the "secret treaties" for the world to see the cynical deals made by the powers behind closed doors.
Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the new government, issued this statement which says everything you need to know about secret diplomacy:
STATEMENT BY TROTSKY ON THE PUBLICATION OF THE SECRET
TREATIES
22 November 1917
Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.
The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.
The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.
The workers' and peasants' Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme, expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite.'