Nice guys
Surprise surprise – Julian Assange and Donald Trump have things in common – and not just the predilection for sexual assault.
Julian Assange isn’t a Russia spy, but he is taking revenge on Hillary Clinton, and “if an anonymous or pseudonymous group came offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions,” James Ball, who worked with WikiLeaks when it made its biggest splash, in 2010, writes at BuzzFeed News.
Anti-Clinton animus isn’t the only thing driving Assange in 2016, after four years of self-imposed exile in a tiny apartment in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Ball writes: Assange thinks himself “the equal of a world leader,” and the leak of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails “is his shot at reclaiming the world stage, and settling a score with Hillary Clinton as he does so.” Yes, Donald Trump, the main beneficiary of this hack, is now praising WikiLeaks, as are many of his supporters, while Assange has lost many fans on the liberal left, Ball says, but “neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed — the world they operate in has.”
I’ve never admired Assange.
Trump and Assange have quite a bit in common, Ball says: Like Trump, “Assange is a gifted public speaker with a talent for playing the media, struggling with an inability to scale up and professionalize his operation, to take advice, a man whose mission was often left on a backburner in his efforts to demonize his opponents.” Neither seems bothered by Russia’s authoritarianism. And then there’s Trump and Assange’s insistence on getting everyone to sign nondisclosure agreements — the thing Ball says led to his estrangement with Assange:
Those working at WikiLeaks — a radical transparency organization based on the idea that all power must be accountable — were asked to sign a sweeping nondisclosure agreement covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for noncompliance was £12 million. I refused to sign the document, which was sprung on me on what was supposed to be a short trip to a country house used by WikiLeaks…Given how remote the house was, there was no prospect of leaving. I stayed the night, only to be woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign. It was two hours later before I could get Assange off the bed.
The stuffed giraffe is a nice touch.
I went to a movie premiere (not a star-studded sort of thing) here in Melbourne, for Assange’s biopic. It was maybe six years ago. After the screening, a panel of relatives (I think his mother was included, but my memory is a little uncertain) and friends of Assange’s took questions and discussed the film and their relationships to Assange. I was struck by the cultishness of both the film and his supporters. There was a sense that Assange was some kind of prophet or saint, taking on the “great Satan” of US global imperialism. There was no critical discussion whatsoever. I found the whole thing bizarre and discomfiting – I find the whole Wikileaks project morally simplistic and misguided in a Manichean sort of way.
Exactly.
Assange doesn’t think anyone else should have any privacy – he’ll leak all sorts of things on people that have no business being leaked. But it looks like he thinks he should have privacy. I guess because he’s ‘special’
A vile, dangerous man, yet still a hero for many on the regressive left.
I’m to some extent sympathetic to the ideal of Wikileaks, but not so much to its practice largely because Assange is the one practicing it.
The ideal is that the world needs to be more accommodating of whistle-blowers because whistles need to be blown. We saw this with Ed Snowden’s and Chelsea Manning’s whistles. They revealed lots and lots and lots (and lots) of things our governments were (are) doing which are clearly wrong in hundreds of ways and in many cases very illegal indeed. We should be grateful when such whistles are blown and be prepared to hold our governments and law enforcement agencies accountable. We should be prepared to support those blowing the whistles. Governments need to keep secrets but when people leak some of those secrets genuinely in the public interest, we should accommodate that flow of information and protect the people leaking it. Our governments shouldn’t be spying on us or restricting our rights based on bogus claims that this will prevent terrorism, for example. But they are and they do and the likes of Snowden and Manning revealed the extent and detail of it.
Wikileaks has never lived up to that ideal, however. It definitely published lots of stuff that was in the public interest, but it was also clearly very much about Assange’s ego. It has reveled in revealing secrets without taking responsibility. It has revealed secrets that are of no particular interest to the public but which hurt people.
And Julian Assange might well be extradited to face trumped-up spying charges and the sort of treatment Chelsea Manning faces every day if he were to answer the rape charges but…. tough fucking shit, Julian. You’ve got to face those rape charges.
We don’t need Wikileaks. We need to not pass laws banning encryption. We need to hold our governments to higher standards than we do now. We need to be able to hold governments accountable if necessary by leaking their shit.
But we don’t have to be slimy, rapey, egotistical pricks who pretend not to recognise that some secrets are worth keeping.
latsot: You just said everything I was going to, with about five times the eloquence and clarity. Thank you.
I did, back when I saw him as a guy speaking against the powerful, a voice of the people sort of thing. He still styles himself in that manner of course, but those days are over now that he is openly partisan.
Oh and ‘self-imposed exile’? The newspapers still give him that generous interpretation? Funny, I’d call it ‘evading rape charges’ personally.
Holmes, you’re talking as if Assange was not white!
/s
Holms:
In fairness, Assange has more to worry about than facing rape charges if he leaves his bunker. He faces being YOINK’D for vague terrorism/treason/spying charges, too. There is an issue here. Look at how Chelsea Manning has been treated, for example. There is a very real prospect of Assange being treated similarly and he doesn’t deserve that. Nobody does.
But don’t get me wrong. He needs to face those rape charges despite that risk. He needs to have the courage of his convictions and so far has not.
Compare and contrast Assange, Manning and Snowden. The important differences are in the risks they actually took, what they lost in taking those risks, the importance to everyone else of the information they leaked and – frankly – whether or not they face rape charges.