This is my response to a post by Boris from the blog "The Galloping Beaver" on the subject of Wikileaks. I thought it could be a stand alone post so I posted it. Here is the link to the original post by the aformentioned blogger:

http://thegallopingbeaver.blogspot.com/2010/11/wikileaks-some-thoughts.html

I have always been of the mind that democracy is an untenable state of affairs, at least on the scale we claim to have them today. This does not mean that I support a dictatorial shift, though I have often stated the best form of government is a benevolent dictator. The problem with my argument, which I tend to point out myself, is that even if you had the most benevolent person at the head of your state, your period of freedom and prosperity would last only until that man or women became unfit to rule or die.

That leaves us with democracy, but what we have today is more a practice in selective oligarchy. This is not just Canada I am speaking of, but the majority of the "democratic" nations of the world. I often see it as a population issue, there are just too many people in the country to make each person matter and if we did then no one would ever be happy and consensus would take too long to reach or would never be reached. This is why we have our representative oligarchy, because individual democracy is not a tenable position either.

So back to Wikileaks, I see this as a force for good in the democratic world. I accept that people can and probably will die from information released by this site, but I also know that governments will have to start wondering if they will be held accountable for actions they thought silenced and sealed. For safety that may not be the ideal outcome, but for a more democratic process it is a necessary evil. Without government accountability you cannot have democracy. The people need to make a choice; you cannot have democracy with a sense of absolute safety for the only way to attain that is through ignorance.

So I ask instead, do you support democracy, or do you support centralized oligarchy. If the former then wikileaks is a god send, if the latter then take out your guns and hunt down those bastards so you can feel safe again. I make it sound like a simple one way or another and most things are not that simple. I will leave it up to the individual to decide if this issue is or not.