Trotsky and the abolition of secret diplomacy

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Mass release of secret diplomatic documents by Wikileaks – a historical precedent


Wikileaks is due to release hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic cables
in the next few hours.  Allow me to make a tenuous, but entertaining comparison.
 There is a historical precedent for the mass release of secret documents
relating to diplomacy between nations. It happened in 1917, shortly after the
Bolshevik Revolution, when a man named Leon Trotsky became the People’s
Commissar for Foreign Affairs and proceeded to publish all secret treaties
between the Triple Entente powers of the UK, France, Russia. These treaties
detailed, among other things, how colonies and state boundaries would be redrawn
after the First World War, and revealed a discrepancy between what nations told
their citizens, and the agreements they made with other powers.

The US government continues justify the steady erosion of civil liberties by
telling its citizens that if they have done nothing wrong, then they have
nothing to hide.  By this logic, the US government should only be worried if
they have done something wrong, which, if the dispatch of groveling ambassadors
to their host country’s leaders around the world is anything to go by, they
certainly have.

Makes for an interesting read.

STATEMENT BY TROTSKY ON THE PUBLICATION OF THE SECRET TREATIES

2 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.’

http://waterinmajorca.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/mass-release-of-secret-diplomatic-documents-a-historical-precedent/

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