УДК 02+002
Френсис Кирквуд
руководитель
справочной службы
Библиотеки Парламента,
Оттава, Онтарио, Канада
Francis
Kirkwood
Reference
Librarian,
Library of Parliament,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Библиотеки,
информация и демократия
в
посттеррористический период:
Куда
идти?
Libraries, information and democraсy
in a post-terrorist age:
where do we go from here?
Девятая Международная
конференция «Крым 2002»
Ninth International Conference Crimea 2002»
В истории есть даты,
которые оказали значительное влияние на
развитие человечества в политическом или
религиозном аспекте. Приведен список из 30
календарных дат, начиная от 1290 г. до н. э. и
заканчивая 11 сентября 2001 г.
После 11 сентября 2001 г. США
развернули массированную войну с
терроризмом во всем мире. Правительство и
СМИ США считают эту дату началом отсчета
нового периода времени. Вопрос заключается
в том, в какой степени ради спасения мира от
ужаса 11 сентября нам придется поступиться
ценностями и правами граждан
демократических стран с открытыми и
свободными гражданскими обществами.
Сегодня
некоторые страны используют необходимость
противостояния террору и защиты свободы и
правопорядка в качестве оправдания
дезинформированию населения и
установлению жесткого контроля за
циркуляцией информации в обществе.
Разжигание страха при помощи ложной
информации и ограничение доступа к полному
объему правдивой информации со стороны
секретных служб наносят ущерб процессу
развития демократии, в котором участвуют
информированные члены общества.
Какой должна быть реакция
на эти процессы библиотекарей и
специалистов по правительственной и
официальной информации? Нашей
профессиональной обязанностью является
более активная позиция в этом вопросе.
Во-первых, нам следует
отдавать себе отчет в том, что национальная
безопасность является многоаспектной
проблемой. Это значит, что мы должны любыми
способами разыскивать для своих
пользователей информацию или документы,
которые не были опубликованы или сразу
стали закрытыми с целью избавления
правительства от ответственности перед
обществом.
Во-вторых, библиотекарям
следует искать подтверждения полученной
информации о деятельности правительства,
особенно полученной через Интернет. Одной
из целей библиографии является полная
идентификация первичного документа. В
базах данных и источниках Интернета,
содержащих правительственную информацию,
записи должны сопровождаться аннотациями,
раскрывающими полноту и точность
представленной информации, или ссылки типа
«см. также» на источники информации об
альтернативных точках зрения.
В-третьих, нам следует
придерживаться принципа избирательности.
Необходимо принимать взвешенные решения по
поводу того, кому и для чего нужна та или
иная информация.
В-четвертых, библиотеки
должны создавать системы помощи своим
пользователям. Эти системы должны включать
в себя информацию об исследователях,
общественных группах по интересам,
различных точках зрения, а также о других
источниках информации в тех областях, в
которых правительство неохотно
предоставляет информацию. Но следует также
проявлять избирательность в том, какие
контакты открывать пользователям.
И, наконец, в-пятых, надо
действовать вне пределов общепринятых норм,
когда речь идет о дополнительных
финансовых затратах. Правительство может
вводить плату за пользование своими
материалами. В этом случае библиотекам
придется нести финансовые затраты или
искать дополнительные источники
финансирования, так как главной их целью
является удовлетворение запросов
пользователей, а не защита своего бюджета.
В войне против
терроризма задача библиотекарей
заключается в выявлении чрезмерной
концентрации власти в руках правительств,
большого бизнеса, мафии и террористических
организаций, а не только служба интересам
государства.
A climate of propaganda and information chill is being fostered by some
governments in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001 on the United
States. Historical perspective suggests that this is an exaggerated reaction.
What should the response of librarians and other legal and government
information specialists be? The thesis is presented that the proper professional
role of librarians as providers of public information and promoters of democracy
is to subvert the secrecies and reveal the excesses of every form of
concentrated power – government, big business, the mafia, terror networks –
and not just to serve the interests of the state in the war against terrorism.
There are some dates – a very few – which reside in our collective
memory and shape our culture, our history, our consciousness. Sometimes it is
the exact date in the calendar we remember, other times only the approximate
year. Some are political, some are religious. Some we remember gladly, some with
horror. But over time they have acquired a life of their own, these mythic
dates, so that the mere mention of them carries significance, conveys awareness
of a time when the world suddenly changed.
I am from Canada, so I have done a little informal research into the
consciousness of North American pundits and intellectuals on this question. I
asked my friends recently what dates they thought carried the greatest symbolic
significance for humanity. We came up with a list of thirty:
Passover, around 1290 B. C.
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Moses leads the Exodus of the Israelites
from Egypt.
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Full moon, May, 528 B. C.
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Siddhartha Gautama attains Enlightenment as the Buddha.
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September, 490 B. C.
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Battle of Marathon: Greece defeats the Persian invasion.
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June 13, 323 B. C.
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Alexander the Great dies, conqueror from Egypt to India.
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221 B. C.
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Shih Huang Ti, the First Emperor, unifies China.
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Ides of March, 44 B. C.
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Julius Caesar assassinated. His legacy: the Roman Empire.
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Passover, 30 A. D.
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Jesus of Nazareth crucified at Jerusalem. From his empty tomb
Christianity rose to supersede the Caesars.
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June 2-16, 455 A. D.
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The Vandals sack Rome.
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The Hegira, 622 A. D.
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Muhammad flees to Medina, but there organizes the first victorious
community of Islam.
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Christmas Day, 800
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Charlemagne founds the First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which lasts until 1806.
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October 14, 1066
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Battle of Hastings: the Normans conquer England.
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July 15, 1099
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The First Crusade takes Jerusalem (lost in 1187).
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June 15, 1215
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Magna Carta: English rights and liberties led to the birth of
parliamentarydemocracy
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May 29, 1453
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Turks take Constantinople: fall of the Roman Empire.
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October 12, 1492
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Columbus discovers America.
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October 31, 1517
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Martin Luther begins the Protestant Reformation.
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January 30, 1649
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English Parliament executes King Charles I.
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July 4, 1776
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American Declaration of Independence.
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July 14, 1789
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Storming of the Bastille in Paris: the French Revolution.
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June 18, 1815
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Final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
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January 18, 1871
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The Second German Reich.
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July 28, 1914
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Assassination of the Austrian archduke starts World War I.
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October 25, 1917
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Storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg: the Russian Revolution
brings Communism to power.
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November 11, 1918
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Armistice ends World War I.
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January 30, 1933
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Hitler comes to power, founds the Third German Reich. His legacy: 50
million war dead, 6 million murdered Jews.
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December 7, 1941
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Surprise Japanese air attack on Americans at Pearl Harbor.
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August 6-9, 1945
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American atomic bombs destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 180, 000
civilians and ending World War II.
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July 20, 1969
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First human explorers land on the Moon.
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November 9, 1989
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Fall of the Berlin Wall: end of Communism in Europe.
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September 11, 2001
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Aerial terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists on New York and Washington
kill 3000 U. S. civilians and 1000 military.
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Indeed
unforgettable and horrific are the televised images, rebroadcast again and
again, of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center in New York. The
al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on America of September 11, 2001, have sparked a
massive response in the United States and have fuelled a world-wide war
on terrorism. Since the American empire has mobilized its forces and its
allies to help stamp out terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere and protect the
Western way of life, governments and the American media have been doing their
utmost to present the date as a defining moment of change. But it is far too
soon to know whether 9/11, as many have taken to calling it, deserves a place
with the other key dates in the world’s permanent memory of the rise and fall
of empires and civilizations.
What
is clear now, and has been for several months already, is that the fear of
September 11 has changed the way the world’s people think about governments,
about information and about freedoms. Terrorism has become a factor in our
everyday lives. We are resigned to it, we expect it, we study it; we take
security measures and we make war against it. Fear and propaganda between them
have indeed made the entire world a theater of war. The question is whether in
saving the world from the fear of 9/11 we shall compromise our values and our
rights as citizens of democratic, open, and free civil societies.
There
is a paradox at work here. All of us know that terrorism remains active, both in
the Middle East and elsewhere, and that security countermeasures and some
restrictions on the free flow of information are necessary to counter the
terrorist threat. But by its very immediacy in our daily concerns terrorism has
lost much of its power to surprise or to panic us, to change the issues or to
force a negotiation with its demands. Outside of the hotbeds of real conflict in
Palestine and Afghanistan many of us have quietly slipped into a new world, a
kind of post-terrorist age, in which terrorists actually can do little to shock
or harm us, but are an omnipresent bogeyman.
Terrorism
has become an ordinary, not an exotic evil, and the countermeasures against it
risk becoming ordinary too. The danger is that we will come to accept government
restrictions on information flow, to support the arrest and extraordinary
detention of civilians without trial, or to tolerate the violation of civil
rights and human dignity through ethnic and religious profiling of potential
terrorists, not as brief emergency measures in a time of crisis but because they
are part of the price governments have told us we must continue to pay for
comfort in this new, uncertain world.
The
evidence is anecdotal, but news reports and professional contacts suggest that a
climate of propaganda and information chill is being fostered by some
governments in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001. In some countries
a measured response to terrorism predominates, and information continues to flow
with relative freedom. But in others the signs of the times include official
paranoia, a culture of secrecy, government disinformation and bureaucratic
controls over information, akin to what was seen in the hot and cold wars
against the fascist and communist dictatorships of the 20th century.
During
the struggles of the liberal democracies of the West against the Communists or
against the Nazis it was always understood that such controls were a temporary
thing. Governments, as servants of the people, would restore the restricted
liberties once the necessities of the conflict for civilization were past. The
fear that justified internment of alien civilians or censorship was a justified
fear of a brutal alien dictatorship that would bring weapons of mass destruction
to bear in its quest for world domination and would carry out far worse measures
of state terror against conquered civilians than these interim infringements of
democratic freedoms.
The
difference now is that the older monopoly of fear has been broken. Not only may
governments hold their citizens or the world to ransom through nuclear or police
terror, but so too can others. Giant multinational corporations acting in the
name of free enterprise can hold whole countries to ransom through economic
intimidation. Organized crime, through the gangsterism associated with illegal
transborder drug trafficking and schemes of «business protection», casts the
shadow of fear upon dwellers in the slums, migrants, peasants, small
entrepreneurs and the middle class alike; in some countries the mafia even
mounts an insurgency against the government to protect its interests. And now we
must fear even the shadowy cells and networks of fanatics who are ready to die
in the name of their unsatisfied cause, and in so doing take ordinary lives on a
massive scale.
In
this world of competing terrors the ongoing need to defend freedom and order is
used by some to justify permanent measures of governmental disinformation and
information control which have the potential to radically compromise democratic
values themselves. The engineering of more effective fear to mobilize popular
support by false or distorted information, or the restriction of access to true
and full information by the secrecy apparatus of the bureaucratic state, both in
the name of the war against terror, are by their nature destructive of the
processes of a free, participative democracy driven by an informed citizenry.
They compromise the growth and health of the international civil society ruled
by law, to which governments, corporations, criminals and terrorists alike
should be accountable for their misdeeds.
What
should be the response of librarians and other government and legal information
specialists when they encounter propaganda and restriction of government
information, instead of reliable documentation or straight answers from
government agencies? Should we just throw up our hands and say, «Too bad, but
we can’t get it for you if they don’t want to give it to us»? I think it is
our professional responsibility to take a more proactive approach.
First,
we must recognize that claims of national security are a very large blanket that
can be used to cover a multitude of sins. From the time of Caesar to the present
era of the declining American empire, Lord Acton’s dictum remains true: «All
power corrupts. «There is no reason to suppose of our governments that they do
not contain an inordinate number of rogues and scoundrels motivated by
self-interest and preferring to keep their activities in the dark. This means
that we should actively seek to acquire for our clients, by direct or indirect
means, any document or information that appears to have been classified or left
unpublished merely to avoid a public accounting by government, the military or
their friends. Use whatever formal freedom- of-information or
access-to-information mechanisms are available on your client’s behalf. And
cultivate the friendship of investigative journalists, who often know where the
information is buried.
Second,
librarians should seek to provide professional authentication of information
from or about governments, and especially what is found on the Internet. All
information is not created equal. One of the purposes of bibliography has always
been to identify objectively the source and utility of documentation, through
such indices as publisher information, headings for corporate authors, and
subject headings. As reliable bibliographic indices become less readily
available in the fluid world of information on the Internet, our responsibility
becomes greater to qualify the origins and worth of documents, even through
internal verification of their content. Library databases or websites which
contain government information may need annotations concerning the version,
completeness and obvious bias of content, or linkages in the form of «See also»
notes to alternative views and interpretations. In extreme cases, we should not
shy away from using the word «propaganda» or its equivalents to describe a
document.
Third,
we need to exercise discretion. While it is not true that there are terrorists
under every bed, clients too can have their hidden agendas, and we may need to
make professional decisions on who needs or can indeed handle properly certain
information. For example, if a client is simply angry with the government for
hiding information on pollution, but has no professional expertise in the field,
it may be wiser not to provide her with an entire shopping list of government
and private sector reports on everything from nuclear reactor leaks to pesticide
use, but instead to refer her to an advocacy organization like Greenpeace which
has expert advice and summaries to offer. Requests for official information on
the manufacture of bombs should always be suspect unless they come from persons
with a verifiable need to know. On the other hand, as librarians we are agents
of the public, not of government. I can think of very few circumstances in which
a librarian should let a government official dictate restrictions of access to
government publications that were previously declassified and are already held
in the general library collection. Still less should we accede to requests from
the security services for information on what government information is sought
by one of our regular patrons.
The
reference to Greenpeace raises a fourth question, the networking role of the
librarian or specialist in providing government information. Traditionally the
role of libraries and reading rooms of public and legal information has been to
provide access to documents. In an era when documents or other government
information may not be so readily forthcoming as previously, I think that
libraries must build networks of assistance for their clients. Collect
information on researchers, public interest groups, dissident voices, uncensored
alternative public information media in sensitive fields where government is
reluctant to give out information. Foreign and international contacts may be
valuable. But as with access to more sensitive materials in the collection, be
discreet in deciding what information contacts you should give to a client.
Fifth
and last, be willing to think outside the accepted norms when it comes to
funding and resources for public government information collections. In the case
of access-to-information work, for example, there may be no provision for
covering the cost of such activities in the normal funding received from the
state or the municipal authorities. Governments may decide to be more selective
in the documentation they deposit free of charge for public use in your library,
and may instead impose special charges to get the information, ostensibly to
save money. Seek a special budget for such purposes from the state itself or
from private foundations. Trade favors or collection materials with other
libraries, with journalists, with anyone who can get you the information. While
you can’t afford to spend money your library does not have, be inventive. Your
first responsibility is to serve your client, not to protect your budget.
Governments
like secrecy as much as ducks like water. Given the excuse of terrorism and
state security, bureaucrats will often try to spin a false story, to deliver
misinformation or to restrict access to accurate information. We expect this of
private interests such as big business or the mafia, not to mention from the
shadowy terrorist networks. But we as information professionals and as citizens
cannot tolerate it from our governments.
I
submit to you that the proper professional role of librarians as providers of
public information is to be subversives. In the name of democracy and freedom we
must seek out the truth through every means, and in so doing subvert the
secrecies and reveal the excesses of every form of concentrated power, be it
terror networks, organized crime, big business, or government itself. We must
serve the interests of citizens and not just the interests of the state in the
war against terrorism.
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