With the madness surrounding the hero-worship of Bradley Manning by a lot of kids brought up on the Internet (as in: brought up in a barn), it pays to note once again that Julian Assange isn't a hero, isn't a transparency activist, and isn't any of those things many perhaps well-meaning (but usually aggressively propagandizing) people claim he is on Twitter.
It's a good time to recap some important articles on this subject which explain what Assange's actual anarchist and destructive thinking is all about -- it is not about seeking human rights, or better behaviour by states, or calling out their violations with some altruistic notion of the rule of law and better performance.
No, it's about creating anarchic conditions to destroy states and then have...whatever...take over instead. And that's why I've always explained that WikiLeaks (and Occupy later and other offshoots) are all about taking power: WikiLeaks is about a War for Power, Not Rights or Freedom.
I was helped toward this realize by Aaron Bady's writings. I remember back when I first read this unknown-blogger I thought he might actually be an honestly critical scholar. But soon I realized he was an idealogue -- it is no accident, comrades, that he wound up in Occupy Wall Street at his university himself, ranting incoherently from the camps later. Even so, the analysis of Assange by Bady is crucial. Some other renditions of it that simplify it are here and here -- if you want the shorter take.
Then there is L. Gordon Crovitz, who wrote an important piece synthesizing all this for the Wall Street Journal. We live in a time when libertarians and leftists are really almost the same thing, and that working at the supposedly conservative WSJ doesn't really mean what it used to. Crovitz later abandons the insights he obtained at least about the state of the United States to urge that multilateral institutions be "deleted" if he and his NGO friends (and spouse, head of HRW's "global initiatives") don't like them.
In any event, all these links to Assange's writings, where you learn that he is essentially a common Leninist wishing "the worse, the better" for the liberal democratic state of America as a low-life anarcho-socialist tactic -- and not some freedom crusader -- are helpful to keep in mind now as Assange keeps trying to put himself in the news.
The Guardian does a pretty good job of debunking the cult of personality Assange has built up around himself in their latest interview -- replete with his angry self-justifying tirades about all the people he's fallen out with and incessant correction of everyone around as "never being correct enough" about understanding his precious self -- but still, they leave some big gaps.
One obvious thing is this bald-faced lie about supposedly have exposed US "mass murder":
What about the fracture with close colleagues at WikiLeaks? "No!" he practically shouts. But Domscheit-Berg got so fed up with Assange that he quit, didn't he? "No, no, no, no, no. Domscheit-Berg had a minor role within WikiLeaks, and he was suspended by me on 25 August 2010. Suspended." Well, that's my point – here was somebody else with whom Assange fell out. "Be serious here! Seriously – my God. What we are talking about here in our work is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – hundreds of thousands – that we have exposed and documented. And your question is about, did we suspend someone back in 2010?" My point was that there is a theme of his relationships turning sour. "There is not!" he shouts.
None of the WikiLeaks material does what he claims. It doesn't show the US guilty of killing hundreds of thousands of people. It shows the US in two wars fighting other forces that are responsible for killing the lion's share of civilians in those settings -- most of the 100,000 people killed in Iraq are killed not by US troops, but by terrorists and militants backed by Al Qaeda, Iran and other bad actors. Some 85% of the civilians in Afghanistan are killed by the Taliban and their allies, and 15% by Karzai and his allies, which include the US and NATO -- which are responsible for a fraction of civilian deaths. WikiLeaks does not reveal any evil war machine -- except those evil war machines that the US fights, and in doing so, does at time go against its ideals or at times regrettably kills civilians on the way to killing terrorists. The scale and magnitude of the killing is done by the terrorists and Assange doesn't even have a theory for this, so deluded is he -- and I can't think of any more appropriate word when I read these interviews -- with his monomania and theory of anarchism and states.
Assange -- and not without the lefty Guardian's help here -- has also developed a false theory of his "accomplishments":
"Changes in electoral outcomes, contributions to revolutions in the Middle East, and the knowledge that we have contributed towards the Iraqi people and the Afghan people. And also the end of the Iraq war, which we had an important contribution towards. You can look that up. It's to do with the circumstances under which immunity was refused to US troops at the end of 2011. The documents we'd published directly were cited by Iraqis as a reason for discontinuing the immunity. And the US said it would refuse to stay without continued immunity."
But everyone knows the Arab Spring happened before and after and without WikiLeaks -- its role is minor. Barrett Brown also is labouring under the delusion that he and Slim, the Tunisian blogger and admirer of Anonymous, wrought the Tunisian revolution -- as if there wasn't a guy who set himself on fire, and no women in black demonstrating. Sigh. As for the "Iraqi people and the Afghan people" -- oh, come now. They have been largely massacred by terrorists, and they know it and we know it. Does terrorism get worse or better when US troops are present? Well, for one, it has continued since we left. Did we cause it? Oh, this is an academic debate, as terrorists do the killing and they have to take the responsibility -- they could have stopped any time, made peace, and the US would leave. They just don't want a secular government. That doesn't mean these secular governments are so pretty -- they are corrupt. One reason they are corrupt is that they are surrounded by the constant pressure of extremists and terrorists.
Was WikiLeaks the cause of the Iraqis refusing to give the US immunity? Oh, stuff and nonsense. Even without any WikiLeaks, the Iraqis had plenty of reason not to give immunity -- remember, Abu Ghraib was discovered by the US media and human rights groups and prosecuted by the US -- long before any WikiLeaks. Lots of countries refuse to give immunity and make special deals around the ICC -- this is why the US hasn't ratified the ICC. All of this situation existed before, during and after WikiLeaks as its own set of dynamics, and it is absurd for this meglomaniac to claim it as his "accomplishment".
The Guardian pretty much exposes Assange's claim not to be working with the Kremlin by its own skepticism -- and reporting elsewhere -- but just in case the dots need filling in: the production company came into being *over* talks with RT's wily director, Margarita Simonyan. She herself endlessly bragged about it on her own TV show in Russian -- does Julian Assange think there aren't people who understand Russian and can't watch Russian TV and see his lies? She gave his "independent production package" that she "only purchased like many others" maximum PR rotation and utterly dwarfed those other, smaller outlets that may have also chimed in with the Kremlin. Please. This is all pretty ridiculous. Assange went to work for the Kremlin's chief Western propaganda outlet because its Leninist politics suit him.
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