The Assange Syndrome 2.0
Here is a revised version of this essay. Some people had trouble with the format of version one. But Assange followers still need to find a better goal.
What this is
I am saying some things which I think need to be said about Julian Assange. Since I think this is a particularly important topic, I want to make it accessible to as many people as possible. I wrote an earlier version in a ‘stream of thought’ mode, which more square brained people often have a problem with; they think I am rambling and muddled.
I do not want to be rambling and muddled. So, I will lay out the same arguments in a more linear way, for people who have trouble using the right side of their brains. But if their real problem is they just do not like what I have to say, I cannot help them.
Most people interested in the Assange case do not like what I am saying, and I have had some fierce attacks on some internet forums. None of these people seem able to question the factual and logical basis of what I am saying. My feeling is that if this gets even one or two competent people to stop wasting time with the Assange cult and to refocus on something more useful, it will have been worth my while.
Why and how I am writing it
Another installment of the long running Kangaroo trial of Julian Assange has concluded. They seem to be bringing him out of his prison every few months to show what they can do to insiders who betray them. Each time, he is in worse shape.
Thus it is time for me to blog again about the word’s most famous martyr. This was a thorough revision of something I wrote two years ago when I was just getting started at the blogging business. And now, of course, a linear reconstruction. The basic facts and my take on them are still the same.
I will keep refining this and republishing it at appropriate intervals. I welcome feedback to help me to refine it, but mostly I get back hysterical and obscene personal attacks from ‘true believers’, or ragging on how I say it, rather than the substance of what I say.
The problem with Assange
My main thesis is, very simply, that people are building Assange up in their minds to be something he is not.
The supporting theses are; that the effects he has had have been wholly negative; he is a distraction from what people really need to focus on and to do. And; that people’s dysfunction on this subject derives in part from some bad ideas regarding ‘truth’ and ‘freedom’ which are deeply rooted in western culture.
Points of history of Wikileaks and Assange, and what they show.
It is very hard to get 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 the 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 is well established that his real views tend toward right wing libertarianism. Thus it is strange that he is so fervently supported by so many hard left and green left people.
Some of the 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. Yet its actual history is obscure and confusing. I am sure I will never 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 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. You maintain operational security.
Whatever use he was to the fight against whatever exactly he has been fighting, 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 that 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.
These 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. Out of desperation his defence lawyers have now laid on the table that he has been diagnosed with Autistic spectral disorder. That has long been obvious from his behaviour, which is somewhat disconnected from reality.
As to the cause of his persecution, and 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 originate from the Democratic party establishment in the USA and from some sections of the USA intelligence community. It is supported by the Republican Party and by the financial oligarchies of the U.K. and Assange’s home Australia.
Situation of Assange and followers
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.
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 proper thing a lawyer should do when it is obvious that his or her client cannot get a fair hearing, is to clearly document this condition and to demand that it be corrected; if it will not be, then to just walk out of the courtroom. However, this legal team is no doubt making plenty of money out of going on with a case they will not be allowed to win but can go on almost indefinitely.
Assange may as well just let them send him to the USA. Whatever situation he finds himself in there 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.
Alternative to Wikileaks
The Wikileaks organization does seem to have won its battle with state security services in the Atlanticist or “western” countries. These are having an ever harder time keeping anything secret. However, Wikileaks is clearly outliving its limited usefulness.
Information leaks that really hurt the deep state and reduce its power come mostly from disillusioned present or former members of these services. Often they pass it on to Wikileaks or to “journalists” 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, as Wikileaks and Assange have often been guilty of.
Why all things related to Assange are in all ways destructive.
Assange 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 circumstances 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.
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.
In very few places on earth, and in no place in the English speaking world, is there a democracy. To try to act like you are in a democracy in the hope that the state around you will start to act as a democracy, is deranged. We are all under an oligarchy and the rules of an oligarchy.
We will not transform from an oligarchy to a democracy through the institutions of an oligarchy; its legal or political processes. It must be replaced. Toward this, publishing the secrets of the Oligarchy is of limited use. If no one is going to do anything about their crimes, the rulers do not care.
Nothing could be more craven and a misdirection of energy than trying to argue in the law courts of the oligarchs for the freedom of someone who has seriously angered them and who they want to make an example of. To restate, a favourite technique of oligarchic groups for neutralizing all sorts of opposition groups is to trap their leader or other valued person so that they become obsessed with “rescuing” that person.
In addition to wasting his own life, Assange has damaged many other people’s lives. He induced them to deliver secrets to him and failed to protect their identities, getting them in big trouble. The most famous example of this is Chelsea Manning, who sent several years in prison for this reason. She has criticized Assange for this.
To sum this up, Assange’s warped understanding of reality leads people to waste energy and resources, to put themselves at needless risk, in pursuit of the wrong aims. We do not need people ‘exposing The Truth’. The truth is known. The need is to act on it.
A warped understanding of Freedom of Speech and Press
The flawed concept of ‘journalism’ comes from the flawed concepts of ‘free press’ and ‘free speech’ which in turn come from the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism ultimately 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 eventually leads.
Liberalism is a philosophy of and for oligarchy. 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.
Thus 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.
Conclusions
Contrary to the writings of some people who should know better but have gone batty about Assange, he does not illuminate anything around him. He fits the classic definition of a stupid person; he brings down everything around him and also brings himself down.
He is very destructive to the endeavours of people he associates with. He has compromised people trying to expose official malfeasance. He has diverted people’s attention to himself and his problems instead of to what they should be focussed on.
The facts of Assange’s life show a person with a lack of judgement, a craving for attention, and serious masochistic and death wish tendencies. It seems he is almost dead now. He seems to want to die. People should forget about him and move on.
The last argument for continuing to engage in the Assange cult seems to be that his judicial persecution sets a bad precedent for journalists seeking to “expose the truth”. This is an instance of people with a liberal mindset imagining that they or those they are concerned with have rights which they have never had.
We do not live in a democracy. We are under an oligarchic state which can ignore its own laws, kill us, subject us to show trials, whenever it chooses. It generally does not care what a minority thinks about it. It does not have to as long as no significant number of people are able and willing to act to enforce rights and curb abuses of power.
As for “exposing the truth” about oligarchic power, we have people now who know how to do that the right way. They do not draw attention to themselves. They keep themselves either invisible or out of reach of the oligarchs.
The western oligarchies are no longer able to keep anything secret. They are collapsing and becoming desperate. What is needed now are people who can organize quietly and competently to begin replacing them with a genuine democracy.
People with ideas of “free speech”, “free press”, and “civil liberties” really have no role in this. These ideas never lead to actual freedom or liberty.
If my writing gets one sane and capable person to move away from these ideas and to work seriously toward replacing the present oligarchy with an authentic social democracy, it will have been worth the effort.
I have the comments section open on my home blog.