Julian Assange has managed to alert commentators of every political stripe to the idea that someone (or, more accurately, organised gangs of someones) are hideously exploiting the public's lapdog allegiance to an all-powerful state.
Some of us - for a bloody long time - have been saying that you'd be better off looking for truth in a politician's farting patterns rather than in what they say while they smile and insist they're working for you. Yes, just you.
You know they are looking after your interests, err, because they need your vote, don't they? So they must be on your side, right?
OK, sometimes they destroy your life with some silly scheme their preferred 'partners' suggested (the same partners who are paid to do so by the very same system which enriches politicians), but it's all for your own good, innit?
We all think the same way, d'you see? We all want certain things banned at the behest of charities and civil servants, for example, and we are all desperately crying out to be regulated, controlled, denormalised and criminalised on the say-so of someone else who is always right by virtue of being paid to produce stats which 'prove' they are right.
Everything is cool. You may be climbing the walls in anger but that calm, generous, voice of your representative is there to reassure you that - while his idea is going to screw you roughly - you mustn't fret. Politicians are interested only in what you are interested in yourself. Honest.
Funny, then, that when someone like Assange gives the public something which they are overwhelmingly in favour of, politicians squeal like stuck pigs, hyperbolise about non-existent dangers, and issue an APB entitled "get the bastard".
Not just in one country, either. Oh no, they all get together and defend their dictatorial selves from inconvenient (as, let's face it, that's about all they are) revelations with death threats; wild accusations of fantasy fatalities (their stock-in trade); before corralling all the forces at their disposal to silence dissent.
The fact that the world's public - from, for want of more international terms, 'Mailites' to 'Guardianistas' - are heavily lined up behind Assange holds no water for these selfish bastards. So they go into self-preservation mode despite compelling evidence of resistance from the global population.
Freeze his bank account? Everyday people take the bank's website down. Call a mate to stop the leaks being aired on the 'net? Everyday people will work to ensure it stays there. Eradicate all possible routes of public donations to Assange's cause? Everyday people will attack those who are doing the eradicating. All applauded from the sidelines by an approving popular majority.
Such behaviour, when viewed in a rational and objective manner (not a perspective natural to politicians in the 21st century, unfortunately), should be taken as a warning that politicians have boiled so much piss that we can't bear to trust any of them anymore; that we despise every last one of them for ignoring their employers (that is, us) and carrying on with their self-enhancing agenda for too long; that they should rein in their nonsense and begin to realise that they are there to serve us instead of merely protecting their own careers and kind.
The problem is that they are incapable of doing so. All have been through the machinery which produces career bullshit merchants, and none are capable of the humility to admit that they have seriously fucked things up.
Assange isn't a problem. His leaks are a timely solution to the debilitating worldwide phenomenon of politics failing to represent the interests of the people it was originally supposed to defend.
We're sick to the back teeth of quite absurd lies; of real people being treated with contempt; and of being played for every penny we own by those who refuse to be held accountable even when their venality and aversion to openness is displayed for all to see.
And who not only refuse, but also unleash violence on anyone who dares stand up to the self-preservatory shield they have constructed around their ivory towers.
Assange is in jail right now, whilst disgusting bastards who have righteously derogated the lives of everyone they are elected to serve, are free to call on their bullies to ensure that their self-indulgent pronouncements should never be called into question.
The relationship between politicians and the public has been strained for decades. It began as a mild irritation that parliaments had a habit of cocking a deaf 'un when they felt like it, but they now live in a world so divorced from the cares and concerns of their citizens that irritation has evolved into a quietly seething anger. But an anger which was largely lidded by its disparate nature of divided causes and separate issues.
The global administrative zeal with which Wikileaks - and Assange personally - has been pursued, though, has drawn all such groups, left, right, conformist or libertarian, together. The rapidly-escalated vitriolic spite of the worldwide political elite has never, but never, been seen when dealing with issues which the public hold dear.
But once politicians themselves see their control structures being broken down, no obstacle is great enough to effect an immediate bully-boy response. Even the death penalty - constantly rejected as barbaric when suggested by electorates - is all of a sudden considered palatable by those desperate to silence dissent.
People have been suspicious about the motives of their political elites for many a year, but Wikileaks have now left us all in no doubt whatsoever. No matter how hard-working a political system claims to be for its citizens, such effort pales into insignificance when compared to the mighty trees they will pull up to defend themselves from a challenge to their self-appointed power.
The most damaging revelation we have seen from Wikileaks this week is that governments everywhere see populations as the enemy; and their own self-preservation as paramount.
The myth of democracy has never been laid more bare.
