Another installment of the long running Kangaroo trial of Julian Assange has concluded. They seem to be bringing him out of his prison every three to six months to show what they can do to insiders who betray them. Each time, he is in worse shape.
It is time for me to blog again about the word’s most famous martyr. This is a thorough revision of something I wrote two years ago when I was just getting started at the blogging business. The basic facts and my take on them are still the same.
As for Wikileaks, its actual history is obscure and confusing. I am sure I will never really sort it out. Assange is held out as its sole founder, which does not seem to be the case.
It seems to have been originally conceived as a collective. It seems several of its cofounders left it in its early years, complaining about Assange’s ego problems. Assange himself is an enigma.
It is very hard to come by any factual information about Assange. This is usual when the person is the subject of hagiographers on one hand, and demonizers on the other. Assange also seems to make a great effort to obscure many facts about himself and what his real beliefs are, and to create a false image of himself.
In his teen years, he made himself “Mendax the Hacker”. After the police caught up with him he got off lightly because he did no real damage to powerful interests, and because of his unstable childhood. He was the subject of a documentary about this.
A few things about him stand out from the sludge of contradictory misinformation. It can be well established that his real views tend to right wing libertarianism. Thus it is strange that he is fervently supported by so many hard left and green left people.
Some of these paranoid right wing blogs have claimed that the circumstances of Wikileak’s founding show it is itself a creation of some sort of deep state intelligence branch. That is likely an exaggeration. However Wikileaks, in its early years, clearly had some establishment support.
As with most things to do with the deep state and the oligarchy, it is very hard to determine who is driving what and their real motives. The intensity of Assange’s persecution fits the pattern of someone who had been trusted by an in group and then betrayed that trust. This persecution seems to come from the Democratic party establishment in the USA and its allies in the financial oligarchies of the U.K. and Assange’s home Australia.
The Wikileaks organization does seem to have won its battle with state security services in the Atlanticist or “western” countries. They are having an ever harder time keeping anything secret. However, Wikileaks is clearly outliving its limited usefulness.
In fact, the whole “journalism” idea needs to be discouraged. It seldom gives us any really useful information. It is based on the idea of an investigative reporter or publisher seeking out or receiving information from ‘informants’.
This process almost inevitably gets someone into trouble. The informant usually gets ‘burned’ and ends up in jail. The publisher prances around with his latest ‘scoop’ and maybe a journalism prize. The information obtained is usually stuff known from other sources, or readily surmised.
Information leaks that really hurt the deep state and reduce its power mostly come from disillusioned present or former members of these services. Often they pass it on to Wikileaks or to “journalists”, and who then claim credit for it. An example of this is the “vault seven” revelations about malware developed by CIA.
These people really do act as the public’s intelligence service. They know how to do this work, to cover their tracks. They are not motivated by a need for publicity. They generally do not needlessly expose to harm innocent people who may not know what they are getting into.
I do not generally support the idea of freedom of press and freedom of speech. Some journalists do good work, especially ones who go to where conflicts are occurring and report what is actually going on. Most are full of shit.
The flawed concept of ‘journalism’ comes from the flawed concept of ‘free press’, which in turn comes from the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism turns on the idea of multiple truths, of everyone having their own reality. We can look at the quality of public discourse these days and see where that leads to.
Liberalism is a philosophy for oligarchs. It is directly opposed to democracy. In a real democracy, there would not be much use for journalists. Self important individuals going around ‘investigating’ things where they have no public mandate to do so, would be unwelcome.
Legitimate public and private organizations do have a need to keep secrets. In an authentic democracy, investigating incompetence and impropriety would generally be done by agencies and public commissions. Of course, we are not in a democracy, but a corrupt oligarchic system which needs to be brought to an end.
This brings me back to the character of Assange. He is the portrait of what is wrong with the idea of journalism and capital T ‘Truth’. People who want the truth brought out in all cases are crazy and destructive people. There are many legitimate reasons for keeping secrets, and the ‘Truth Out’ mentality can be very harmful to innocent people and to good causes.
Assange is a very charismatic person and has built an obsessed following around himself. However, I take a dim view of cult followings, especially martyrdom cults. The points of information about his recent career show a strange and dysfunctional personality with a need to be adored, but also a serious masochism and death wish.
Assange has done a series of very stupid things to land himself in the situation he is now in. He at times talked about Wikileaks being the intelligence service for the public. It should not be surprising that various intelligence organizations saw him and Wikileaks as hostile entities and acted accordingly.
If you are going to try to operate as an “intelligence service for the public”, you do not go jet setting all over the world. You stay where you are safe and send out lower level operatives to carry out business. You maintain operational security.
Whatever use he was to the fight against globalism ended when he was arrested in 2010. At that point he should have gone silent and not allowed his associates to waste resources trying to free him. Instead he kept trying to run Wikileaks from his laptop while under house arrest and later while holed up in an embassy.
This means he was compromising the operations of Wikileaks and the safety of people who were providing information. He was also compromising his own legal case. He also complicated things for those Working to protect him, and offended the government granting him asylum.
The second most foolish thing Assange has done has been to go to the Ecuadorean embassy. The point of seeking asylum is that the entity from which it is being sought must be capable of actually providing it. A small power with no clout with the British government and only a leased office space as an embassy, is not qualified to provide asylum.
The obvious place to have gone to was the Russian embassy. He had been working with the Russian state broadcaster RT. Even states such as Brazil, Argentina, or Venezuela, then under anti-imperialist governments, would likely have been able and willing to help.
It is unlikely the British police would have thrown a cordon around the Russian embassy building. Nor would they have intercepted a tint-windowed car going from that building to a special plane parked at an airport. They may even have thought twice about pulling such stunts at the Venezuelan embassy. But Ecuador?
While Assange was in the embassy, he kept trying to publish things which complicated Ecuador’s relations with its neighbours: still trying to act like he was above everything. The Ecuadorean government had to restrict his internet activity over his loud and indignant protests.
But the most foolish thing he has done has been to spurn the offer of the Russian secret services to get him out of the embassy to safety. The Russians put a lot of planning into this operation and were said to be quite disturbed when he angrily rejected it. That will almost certainly have been his last way out of the trap he is in.
Now Assange is being slowly killed in Belmarsh prison. There is no legal or political way out for him unless there is an outright revolution in the UK in the next year or two. He is most likely finished.
If courts in England are as corrupt as they clearly are in Assange’s case, there is no point in dealing with them. The best thing his lawyers could do would be to just walk out. However, they are no doubt making plenty of money out of going on with a case they will not be allowed to win.
Assange may as well just let them send him to the USA. Whatever situation he finds himself in will be no worse than Belmarsh. There are opinions from some American civil rights lawyers that he might actually have a better chance in American courts.
As for the fans of Autistic Assange, they really need to soak their heads and find something better to direct their energies toward. This is a trap which radical left groups continuously fall into. A charismatic leader gets caged and all efforts become focussed on futile efforts to get him or her out, instead of forgetting about him/her and getting on with their original goal.
In fact, that might be the most likely way to get him out. If the forces of darkness no longer get any benefit from The Assange Show, they may decide to just quietly let him go.