A Recompiled Essay

THE DELINEATION:

EXPERT PEACE

& SECRECY

By Gbujama J. M. (2009)

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An Argument For Expertise

The maxim: everyone wants to go to heaven; but no one wants to die is grim commentary on the opposing nature of the probable cost of achieving the efficacy of our means. Having fixed ourselves to this linear reality, it is possible to ascertain the observable proceeding activity; such as dialogue, commonality and technocracy in political control. This theorem is relevant in understanding what is necessary in ability and detail for the guidance of a polity or social order during a period of analysis – to be precise, the issue of expertise.

For in which it is impossible to answer all questions, it is also quite impossible to deny or ignore in totality. Thus in reason, the patterns and trends of success are context forms - and in focus, that is all that is necessary in the identification of root causes, the creative problem solving and visioning in the bazaar of ideas. In judging notions of freedoms and self-sufficiency, there is need to sort out metaphorical distinctions between a village and a collection of chalet cottages, that of a village community and a fellowship resort. The context of one is a place of residence and work, while the other - a place of impermanence and repose. So too in distinguishing the excellence of sacred art of historical significance and that of accessible works of commercial value; this difference in approach being only symbolic, in that it alludes to activities that are the outcome of roads taken, even if not lending reliance to the construction of an essence of domestic characterization. This modus is conformant to the notion of direction beyond the claim of random placement - even in the democratic process - and regards it instead and always as the positioning of an expert nonetheless.

In the stabilization of achievements within polities, the expert has found his calling in the chaos of human relations, since in the mortal condition, peace in definition is troublesome to identify as a constant; though that may be the implicit understanding. In many respects it is war, a violent conflict for what given reason that is more definitive. Consequently, is the psychological aftermath that convenes for want of balance, given that there is little solace to either term as a static condition - exposing the cliché; that after the storm there must be calm and in observation, is no certainty to proceeding state of affairs that follow. Frequently, environmental issues dictate a continuing perception of either state, prompting a pendulum transfer of moody concerns between external and internal. In another sense, such methodology concerns the conceptual climatic singularity of peace in deference to its humane plurality.

Furthermore, less than abstract peace exists in formative counsel appeals against the connotation of negotiation as means of political forgetfulness or defensive instigation, but rather, as process of loss acknowledgment; most controversial - in occupational terms. In this regard, peace is not a designed opportunity to regroup and reinforce on either side of a conflict, nor supposed an opening act of theatre for the display of supporting integrity; a process customarily befitting the political stage. Regrettably, its reality in concert has manifest as a public posturing in certain dimensions towards a deliberate finding; a public square so to speak where reconciliation and healing is imparted in the form of judiciousness, with potential of resulting in what for lack of a better term is a lawful drama. For instance, historians have asserted that the transport of Bai Bureh into Freetown was one such euphoric event; a remarkable spectacle at the turn of the century which led urban Freetownians closer than ever before to applaud greater rural Sierra Leonean civil activity. Though there were no such jubilant trials for local revolutionary networks in present-day attempts, however, seemingly mundane deliberations were stirred by special opting to exact the long arm of the law in the water of transnational matters - to catch a big fish.

The Latency Of Peace

Retrospectively, global media lessons of passionate town hall conflicts and negotiating stages over the last two decades, have forecasted if anything, a sentimental disposition typical of such encounters; an alignment that remains latent and undercurrent amongst most aggrieved polities. Cases in point are encyclopedic sources that reveal past impetus for international peace arbitration to be: a circular letter addressed to the representatives of different nations by the Emperor of Russia Czar Nicolas II in 1898, which coincided with the beginning of colonial résistance wars in then termed Western Sudan. This letter sheds an ironic light on The Hague where such initiatives eventually took place in 1900. Seemingly unrelated, the spread of civil war in Britain’s example colony, Sierra Leone for instance, is a historic reprimand on the global politics of that era in a meeting in which no African nation was directly represented. The letter is a cautious centennial reminder of Special Court diagnosis in Sierra Leone that affiliates with The Hague as recognized option in arbitration operations, bypassing Ivory Coast’s Yamoussoukro and Nigeria’s Abuja. Perhaps incompletely, like The Hague proposal of 1898 there is an acknowledgement of loss, but more so, with inference to a strategic interest that looms larger; still often easily misconstrued as a form of blissful diplomacy. While even in the second Hague conference African interests were only considered in terms of colonial extensions, there was concordance of lost relations in Spanish-American conflicts; yet then as currently, without tribal African trajectories. Emphatically, this is not to argue the inclusion of such demarcations, only to infer some degree of ostrich conduct in a process shortsighted in cause and effect.

In spite of this, the perceptible vision of peace in its true temperament is twofold; first in individual serenity and second - in aggregate realities. Individually, environmental immensity serves as a reflective psychological means of humbling, given responsible knowledge of the undulating effects of unitary awareness on the human mind. As polity, this awareness is realized both as stimulus towards a public course of action and that of executive mediation behind closed doors towards more appeasable standards, spurned by an existence open wide. The impetus of this diminutive difference is similar to John Locke’s contention that society was formed out of a movement from natural chaos to social order. Such was the environmental impetus of earlier peace agreements in Sierra Leone; a momentum gained from attending to the delayed modern itchiness of guerrilla encampments.

Formerly, the conceived standard of internationality in the case of the Special Court, despite the controversy, involved in actuality no internationality in preceding negotiations in the domestic sense, only possibly, in the idea of war being an international entity without limitations of resourcefulness. It is difficult to make case for internationality in domestic civil conflicts, particularly in African nations of which the executive and regional axis have historically spoken louder than democratic outcomes. Moreover, in terms of political structure is the observation of balancing ultimatums, placing new founded democracies against an image of rebellious executive politics in response to civil broadmindedness. Often such processes eventually become an inadvertent ratifying process, channeling a definitive transition from domestic civil politics into that of international politics. In some manner of historical cynicism, fundamental limitations would affirm as general rule, that the cause of a people’s revolutionary be arbitrated in a people’s court, such as occurred in Pol Pot’s Vietnam - not a Special Court. This concerns particular jurisdictions that gateway transitions from civil revolutionary to executive involvement, peripheral to any covert notion; that certain civil revolutionaries act on behalf of greater executive interests - from the onset.

Generally, the absence of absolute political tranquility does not necessarily indicate instability as much as widening constructs in denial of implicit conflicts of authoritative interpretation. The benefits of such legal expansions are clearly, an opportunity to acknowledge a mirror image of loss both in terms of war and that of methodological inaccuracies in political stipulations; and to ensure the commitance of an appropriate justice. Lack of any forethought would be a vacant purpose, with many attempts at peace serving as a chamber of self-full filled prophecies; which may cause the unmolded court to fashion, predict and produce its own new dilemmas.

On Information, Power & Secrecy

In the realm of the expert, there is much consideration within silence and noise, flesh and rumor, desires and need, praying and deed; a powerful point of secrecy. It is the foundation of the family, the integrity of the being and that which separates the spirit from the host – a to some extent accurate contention of realizations. Derivative of the term secrenere to sever or separate, this belief that secret knowledge is power is often set against the idea that information is power - and is a constituent of the precincts placed on learning, training, meaning, association, endeavor and experience. While this prevaricator may often connect the civilized with the savage and the public with the private; this distinction between the two concepts is not always applicable. Rather, it is the developed philosophy or schools of thought that practice either, that limit the governmental anatomy down to its intestinal category of taboo and in a sense of intellectual growth converts the idea of secrecy into a portentous value.

Whereas secrecy as power is believed to tavern within common by-ways out of reach of the more selective, it is also considered an exclusive place of the extraordinary, eccentric or oddity. This may therefore lend reason for images of the secret laboratory found in the concept of separation, a bubbling metallurgical and chemical process by which minerals are separated from a mass state. Formulations of secret as power differ from discovery; since it is not the unknown, like the scientist’s grey area in which an added drop of probability exposes an ambiguous truth; instead in its place - is an essential fact concealed. For that reason, in the analysis of these concepts the social instruct in use of theoretical elements of secrecy, information and power is most pertinent. For instance, failure to administer remedy is not necessarily secret as power since remedy does not depend on secret as a mechanism. Not at all, secrecy as power is a procedural dependence, often defined in degrees of withholding by silence since it relies on a revelation of sorts in order to transmit meaning. This does not suggest remedy to be absent of power but only to infer that the administration of remedy and its relationship with power carries its own dynamic, alluding a psychological hold and relation characteristic of human curiosity and reason. An analogy of this would be an ancient Olympian statue of a man throwing a discus, sculpted naked, a back as its front - yet with an incomplete front. In this example, reason would have it that there must be a front, thus most viewers would go around the statue.

Historically, arguments of political and integral defense, as well as its opponents have defended proponents of secret knowledge by a press for freedom and safety; whether or not an absence of expertise exists regarding what lies on the other side. An example of this is CNN’s coverage of the first US-Iraq war in which political journalism and its informer protections created an interpretive window in what was considered at that time, war commentary, a political anathema reserved for post conflict interpretation. In this political narrative battle that occurred between the two concepts of secrecy and information, public inquisitiveness and interest in broadcasts literally catapulted the CNN network into existence. As a result, even though information as power appeared to triumph, it was really the idea of secrecy as power that prevailed because the possibility of interaction with an unknown adversary. Retrospectively, in spite of all exposures and political history, the government of Iraq at that time was considered no different to Western Hemisphere inhabitants than would have been an extraterrestrial encounter and it was quite an eagerness that fueled whatever political interests that abided.

Finally, beyond authoritarian conflicts between military and media interests, is the observation that “information is power” is expressed as both product of corrective invention and structural advancement. Historically, these two ideas have been accepted differently. In the competitive wisdom of the ancient Chinese, corrective invention was perceived as an en-walled necessity, outside of which all else were uncivilized; versus many other Empires that eventually perceived expansion and exploration as an indication of civility. It is from this empirical stand point that the concepts of information as power and acquiescing secrecy as power can better be exemplified and as point of accuracy much inference can be therefore drawn on notions of learning, invention and derivation. Outside that of theoretical Paganism for example, it is worthy to note that such historical approaches contradict theories of ancient Chinese globalization as well as that European novelty in many aspects.

Presently, there are numerous polities in which information is ignored, abandoned, destroyed and overlooked, as well as often exists a voluminous fatigue which often sedates interest towards information, replaced by a conflict of urgency in acquisition that often compromises the durational balance between critical reasoning and discipline. Any summary lend to the definitions of the two concepts would be, that secrecy as power connotes two ideas; that of associational restriction and the achievement of secret knowledge; while information as power is suggestive of awakening and possible omnipotence, the inference that conditions actually improve with knowledge.