What if the hidden messages in the WikiLeaks cables were less about Tunisia and Russia, more about Winnie the Pooh?
BY MARJORIE GARBER | MARCH/APRIL 2011
Supporters of WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange have protested his arrest in Sweden on sexual charges as a classic "honey trap" -- a sting operation in which an attractive person is used to entrap or coerce a target. In this case the claim is that two Swedish women used sex as a way of trapping Assange. Even though the sex was reportedly consensual, the prosecutor allowed a claim of rape because it was unprotected -- that is, either Assange did not use a condom (alleged by one of the women) or the condom broke (alleged by the other woman).
It won't have eluded the percipient reader of this first paragraph that words like consensual and unprotected have some resonance in the world of international diplomacy -- nor that the "leaks" in WikiLeaks are in this accusation made vividly, and disconcertingly, literal. As for "honey trap," a phrase more familiar in Britain than the United States, its connection with "sting" seems more than coincidental. The honeybee has long been associated in literature and political philosophy with a model of human society -- from Virgil's Georgics to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees to Tolstoy and Marx. Was this "honey trap" baited to protect human society from the unprotected leaking of classified documents? Was the sting set up to prevent what, in apiary culture, has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder"? Or were the (former) colonies in fact themselves collapsing under the weight of government dissimulation?
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