The Lord of Flies nestled within America's intelligence establishment sent lead bees to sting Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X when each was only 39.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is now 39.
A real-life Robin Hood, a Neo from The Matrix, Assange follows the path of Geronimo and H. Rap Brown. He fights for us, by revealing in black and white U.S. complicity in the torture and murder of innocents. Saving Assange may be the first decisive battle of the internet.
I have felt for years that the last defenders of our freedom would be the cyber-anarchists. We are not at freedom's end yet, but cameras capture the average Briton 300 times daily. The Lord of Flies even wishes to invade our minds, to determine when we are lying to him.
There is hope. Mathematical results with practical significance may enable us at least to transmit encrypted messages in such a way that no one unintended can decrypt them. This comes from the fact that it seems to be time-consuming to factor the product of two large prime numbers. For this reason, the Lord of Flies seeks to limit in essence the size of the prime numbers one can use for encryption.
There are two ways we can protect Assange. First, we can complete the mission. The Lord of Flies wishes to shut down WikiLeaks. The world now sees the sham of the neutrality of Switzerland, a country the civilized world should have invaded years ago for giving aid to druglords, dictators, and the people who make those insufferable clocks. Interpol is now illegitimate. Sweden's servility to the United States would make Tony Blair blush.
The way to prevent an epidemic is to make sure that 1 is greater than the reproductive ratio, the average number of people an infected person makes sick. Let's spread the dis-ease. Already there are 200 mirrors of the WikiLeaks site. For every site the Lord of Flies pulls down, let's put two up.
A second way to protect Assange is with the Golden "Mean": Do unto others as they would do unto you. American cowards have threatened Assange and his associates, and their families, and myself, with death. Right-wing politicians and pundits have called for the execution of the people behind WikiLeaks.
Nothing stops the Left from doing the same, except the will, which is lacking, because American liberals often want to make friends with the Enemy. For example, in Oakland, California, local police illegally spied on a black church because it was engaged at that time in anti-apartheid activities. After apartheid ended, I asked a senior pastor of the church what had happened to the guilty police. He didn't know. He hadn't followed it up.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who said, of the war criminals in his predecessor's administration, "This is a time for reflection, not retribution," now says through his attorney general that he wants to "hold people accountable"--meaning Assange.
Let's make an example, just as the Lord of Flies wishes to make an example of Assange. Pick any individual who has called for Assange's death. Shut down that individual's website with denial-of-service attacks. Publically accuse that individual of treason--feel free to invent a reason why, as the gnats of America's right-wing media have no qualms about using this word improperly -- explicitly pointing out that treason carries the death penalty. Put that individual's contact information, along with that of his associates, on a website, on Facebook, on everything. The correctness of this approach stems from ideas in evolutionary game theory, "Tit-for-Tat." It is logical, ethical, and legal -- although naturally it would make sense to set up these non-lethal internet SWAT teams outside the United States.
Very soon the cowards will become quiet.
And, in the quiet that kills hysteria, we may eventually succeed in saving the man who kicked the hornets' nest.