RosieBell

Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water

What a horrible night Thursday was.  I had vaguely expected to hear of another humiliation for George Galloway on the electoral trail, and with that, and Press TV being shut down I thought he would disappear from sight and hearing.  But he comes screaming back.  I have  to give him a grudging salute for his strength and indefatigability.  He certainly wrecked my sleep.

Socialist Unity were crowing over his triumph.   I made a couple of comments on the victory evening:-

"How utterly wretched.  Shameless pandering to religious prejudices wins an election in mainland Britain. I suppose if there had been an appropriate seat up for grabs in Belfast he could have pushed the Catholic buttons - gone on about being anti-abortion, say. 

And even more wretchedly, a bunch of activists and politicos who regard themselves as progressive cheer him on."

"That little hint that his opponent wasn’t a good Muslim because he had had a drink in the past – how would he have managed a similar ploy if he had been chasing a Catholic vote? Once, in stricter times, he could have suggested:-

My opponent has eaten meat on Friday;
My opponent has used a condom; or
My opponent has considered divorce

but Catholics are far more liberal these days.

What would be a clever hint to make about your opponent’s impurity of religion in order to chase Catholic votes rather than Muslim ones?

After all, if politics are going to be conducted through communalism, we should start thinking of the tactical advantage of comparative religious observance. That Ed Miliband guy’s an atheist, isn’t he?"

Those comments were deleted of course.

I was disgusted at the religious communalism that ran through this election.  I thought that was what the Yanks did, out-godding each other as they chase the Presidency.

But Galloway -  all praise to Allah at his victory and that he's on a mission from God, and those that don't vote for him will go to hell.   Saying of his rival,

"When I hear Imran Hussein say, you should vote for him because he's a Pakistani, because he is a quote, unquote "Muslim" I don't know whether to laugh or cry. On the question of Islam, God knows who is a Muslim or who is not. . . Everybody knows he's never out of the pub. 

Rather missing the chance of saying, "Let's drop religion from this election.  It shouldn't matter."

Politics as expression of religious tribalism is poison whether in Glasgow or Cairo. I added Bradford to the list of B's that Christopher Hitchens spoke of when asked about the peace-making aspect of religion:-

“I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now-would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? […] Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

Galloway is coy about whether he has converted or will convert to Islam.  A couple of theories:-

1.    If he converts and then after losing Bradford West he needs a seat where he can play communalist Catholic politics e.g. Belfast or the west of Scotland, he would have to be received into Catholicism again.  That might just make him look opportunistic and inconsistent.

2.  If he converts and then unconverts, it could make it inconvenient for him in some countries he will no doubt be visiting eg Iran where apostasy is illegal. 

Since my initial outrage I have read some analysis - that West Bradford is a peculiar seat; that the politics there were corrupt and clan-driven; that Labour has played communalist politics there for years themselves and this was now biting them in the bum ; that the voters are kicking all the main parties, as they often do in by-elections; that only a rock-star politician like Galloway could have pulled it off.  So it is unlikely to be the trend towards communalist politics that I feared.  You can only be communalist in constituencies which will accept it.

 I am though pissed off with the Bradfordian for electing him.  Galloway's over-blown rhetoric turns my stomach but a lot of them, especially the young ones, lapped it up.  Bradford spring! for Chrissake.  Who does he think he is?  Answers own question - a kind of cross between Saladin on a white horse with a train of Saracens fighting the Crusaders and Lenin leading the masses.   He really does see himself as a man of destiny, with God on his side. 

When he says things like " From the Punjab to Palestine, from Bagdhad to Bradford, everyone will sit up and take notice  for by the Grace of God . . .I have a strong voice." he believes in his own fantasies and gets his followers to believe in it as well.   

 

By the way, note in this video that when addressing people in Bradford he doesn't adopt a cod Yorkshire accent, though when addressing Arabs for some reason he puts on a weird Arab accent eg in this one where he extols Assad and Syria's democracy and human rights record. 

Well, he's got MP written after his name now, which will make him a more acceptable courtier to whatever particularly bloody, repressive despot whose hand he wants to kiss.  Saddam is gone, Assad, the man who upholds the dignity of  Arabs and Muslims*, will no doubt be gone soon.  There's Ahmadinejad and sadly there will  be some ugly Islamist regime established in at least one of the countries that have gone through the Arab Spring.  He'll be at its leader's court, discussing "Zionism" and saluting this new lion with many Your Excellencies and that serious, respectful look and understanding nods. 

Update:-

The newspapers are gleeful that Galloway tweeted "Shattered but happy after the Blackburn triumph.

Well, he is a rock star after all.  There are times when the lead singer greets the crowd "Hullo Liverpool," when  in Manchester, and "Hullo Madrid," when in Lisbon.   (I know this has happened but "rock star" "wrong city" "hullo" isn't turning me up actual instances of this).

Being Galloway, he couldn't just say, sorry, stupid mistake.  No, someone has to have hacked into his twitter account.  I can't do the technology but it seems that is unlikely.   But being Galloway he has to lie about it.  No doubt it was an American and Zionist propaganda plot against him.

(*If you can bear it, read Amnesty's report on what  Assad's security forces visit do to the regime's opponents)

Royal Coup de Grace

Broadcasting in Britain is controlled by the royal family - and they will force any television channel that criticises them to close down, Press TV revealed today.

Ofcom has revoked Press TV's licence, claiming that Press TV had not paid the £100,000 fine that had been demanded after it had broken regulations by broadcasting a "forced" confession from a journalist, and also for being controlled from Teheran rather than London. [more here]

Press TV's scoop:-

Ofcom is said to have close ties to Britain's royal family. And the cables released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks show that Press TV's programs on the royal wedding, which many in the country described as extravagant, angered the royal family.

The CEO of Press TV, Mohammad Sarafaz, is not daunted:-

Sarafraz stressed that Ofcom's bid to revoke Press TV's license will not prevent the channel from broadcasting the truth about the British Royal regime.

“It is futile to attempt to conceal the truth from the people of Britain, and those that want to hear our alternative voice will find a way despite your efforts,” he said.

In these internet streaming days, Mr Sarafaz is no doubt right. Those who are looking for the alternative voice on eg the "Holocaust", will not be thwarted. The fair-minded analysis of the brilliant literary stylist, George Galloway, will still be available. Lauren Booth will still speak her truths to power about Zionist control of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. and their persecution of the popular intellectual, Gilad Atzmon.

Hireling lackey of the British government and Welsh corgi poodle John Humphrys "covered" the story of Press TV on the BBC's Today programme this morning (second item from the end). He interviewed Yvonne Ridley, an employee. So afraid was he of any more revelations about the British royal family's stranglehold on broadcasting in Britain he did not once ask her to enlarge on this exclusive story of Press TV's.

Ms Ridley announced that Press TV could not pay the fine as there are sanctions on Iran's banks. As for her salary, barrels of unrefined oil are collected by her, Mr Galloway and Ms Booth at London's docklands where they hawk them in the street.

All right minded people should demand further investigation into the Royal family's death grip on the media of this country.

We know that Prince Charles is in the habit of interfering in political affairs - normally on matters of architecture, the environment and quack medicine. However, if he has been leaning on media outlets who question paying for Royal extravaganzas, that is the end of The Guardian, the New Statesman and letter writers to The Times.

Here's something that Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate should address:-

Listen matey,
To keep your job,
Act like mater
And shut your gob

Note from Ofcom:- Guards, take her away. (Clang of dropping portcullis).

Too much information

As everyone is saying, there was far too much news this year.   Arab and North African uprisings, News International downfall, dictators and currencies collapsing - the media was a sound surround of important and exciting news.

This picture handily combines two news items into one (29th April and 1st May):-

More of two for the price of one:-

Listen, it wasn't my idea to join the Euro

I predict riots if we close News of the World

To all you news consumers and news makers out there, Happy New Year.

Let it rest

Did we need all that 10th anniversary coverage of 9/11?   Every time the radio interviewed yet another fireman or American Muslim, I switched it off.  So my radio has been ultra-switched off in the last few days.   It was of course reasonable for the bereaved to have some sort of ceremony but the rest of us were forced to take part, willing or not. 

I don't want to take this particular tone:-

Neglected here is that it was a stroke of evil genius for Channel 5 to run Celebrity Big Brother against assorted 9/11 tenth anniversary tellyfilla. Crap celebrity event telly wins against pseudo-concerned wanky-woo.

No, I can't be as cynically callous as that.  But still. . .

I can get tearful on Remembrance Sunday when I listen to the ceremony at the Cenotaph, and Neville Chamberlain's constipated tones repeating that "I hev to tell you now that no such undertaking hez been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany" always make me solemn.  But 9/11?  Serious of course, an outrage for New York, a dreadful blow for those who lost family members.  But why should I mourn this more than any other large death count from an attack on a country that isn't mine?  

I found  however that there are Americans who did not want to join in an enforced collective grief.

Here's Slate's Agony Aunt Dear Prudence:-

Q. Husband Doesn't Feel Sad About 9/11: I have been married for 2-plus years to a man who is wonderful in many ways. However, with all the 9/11 hoopla lately, it's been on my mind a lot and I asked him yesterday if he was thinking about it. He told me that he doesn't allow himself to feel bad about what happened because that doesn't help anything and it would be disrespectful to those who lost their lives that day and in the war since. I don't get his logic and am left wondering if this is normal, or should I be concerned? It bothers me that he doesn't feel what most everyone else feels when they think/talk about 9/11.

A: It sounds as if your husband does feel profound sadness about all the lives lost. But his decision to push the thoughts out of his mind—a luxury that family members don't have, of course—is a perfectly normal one that I'm sure many people made. You asked your husband a question about his emotional life, and he answered you honestly and openly. His answer is reasonable and he's entitled to his own reaction and is not required to feel what you think "everyone else" does.

The assumed feelings of "everyone else" enables the media to fill up their spaces with reminiscences and repeat broadcasts.  Dissenters are regarded as hard-hearted or unpatriotic.  

Q. Overkill: I was a member of the military who lost colleagues and friends on Sept. 11. This anniversary seemed to me like media hype, picking a scab rather than allowing it to heal. Did I mourn? Yes. But can we put this in context, finally, and move ahead? Surely there is more to our nation than the events of this one day.

A: Thanks for this perspective. To the letter writer worried about her husband, I'm hearing from many people who had reactions just like his.

I'm glad that Americans - sane, nice ones - feel like this as well.  

Update

According to this smarty-pants I haven't missed much by my minimal involvement with the 9/11 commemorations. 

I tried insofar as possible to avoid all the 9/11 X ballyhoo, for a couple of reasons. First of all, with due respect to the very good writers who have tackled the subject, I have not read a blessed thing this month that has illuminated 9/11 -- as history, as event, as a social or political phenomenon or anything else that would make such an account worth reading.

I doubt if the USA will go on much longer commemorating this terrorist attack.  To be commemorated an event in history must be a turning point in the nation's ultimate fate eg a great defeat like the Battle of Kosovo for the Serbians or Culloden for the Highlanders or a step on the road to victory like D Day of Bannockburn.  World War II, the American civil war - and revolutions that really did change the society go on receiving some kind of public acknowledgement.  They have a beginning (war declared, independence declared) and an ending (war won, independence won).   

A terrorist attack is a side-show in the overall history of a nation.  Even if it is a step, as in the case of Northern Ireland, towards a power shift it's not something the perpetrators are proud of, and the victims can't keep on proclaiming their victimhood.  Of course the bereaved will commemorate the event that changed their lives but the nation should leave it alone.   As the man above said, it's picking a scab instead of letting it heal.  

Quiet for a while

I have been shifting flats and lost broadband for a while, so things have been quiet here.  

As far as the Breivik massacre goes, I was glad that I was distant from the blogosphere at a time of instant political point scoring, without a decent interval of silence and of not rushing to judgement.  I know little about Norway but I do know what it is like in a country with a small population when something like that happens.  The people of Scotland were deeply upset after the Dunblane massacre.   Friends of mine could not bear to speak about it or look at that school photo of the children with their bright faces and their nice-looking teacher.

Brooksgate, Hackgate or however they'll gate it

Alex Massie is usually a genial chap, but he got his razor out today:-

An exclusive look at a strategy memo prepared for Rebekah Brooks this afternoon:

.....


You were only doing your job and your job was giving the punters what they wanted. (Yeah, we're going to have to drop the it's "inconceivable" that you knew stuff; everyone can conceive that you did. Tough break but there you have it.)

No, if you sinned it was because you loved the readers  - the Great sodding British public - not wisely but too well. They're a prurient, censorious, malignant bunch of bastards and we gave 'em a paper to match. If they've got a problem with that they should look to their own consciences first. Never mind the motes, look at the beams matey.

Read it all.

Good and bad hoaxes

I love a good hoax.  A hoax is a scam and a con job, but not the sort when a low-life flogs off expensive energy deals to pensioners.  Although some hoaxes have made money, that should not be what a hoax is designed for. Its object should be to make the pretentious and pompous look stupid, to expose the vanity of those in high places.   The Emperor's New Clothes is a satisfying story, but there would be little point to The Peasant's New Clothes. Hoaxees are gulled for believing what they want to believe, usually something flattering.   A hoax is cruel but its victims are not pathetic innocents.  You see them as being humiliated as they deserve.   Also, a good hoax confirms the prejudices of the on-lookers.  They have always known that the hoaxee had it coming to them for their superior airs and crackpot ideas. 

Some hoaxes:-

The Sokal Affair.  Alan Sokal submitted a paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", to the cultural studies journal Social Text.  The journal in all seriousness published this paper which among other things stated that "quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct".  The dupes were a bunch of post-modernist pseuds and academics.  They looked like posturing idiots and those who had suspected post-modernism was a shack of jargon were full of glee to see this eyesore get trashed.

The Hitler Diaries. This was more of a forgery for gain than pure mischief, but the egg faced and out of pocket were Rupert Murdoch, the editors of The Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek and the German magazine Stern, and the journalist who "discovered" the diaries, the Nazi-obsessive Gerd Heidemann.  The Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times said later: " When such a scoop is offered, you don't really want to hear anything that would cast doubt on its veracity."   Those of us who regard Rupert Murdoch as being a disgrace to truth and decency were justified by the greedy old despot saying about the affair "After all, we are in the entertainment business.” As a bonus, potential readers, the sort who are creepily fascinated about anything to do with Nazism, were cock-teased as well. 

The poems of Ern Malley. A hoax by a couple of Australian litterateurs on the editors of an avant-garde poetry magazine.  They concocted an unknown poet called Ern Malley and sent in his poems, which they had written deliberately badly.   The poetry magazine ran a special issue celebrating this new important voice in poetry.  The victims in this case were those who are overly impressed by literature that is obscure and difficult.

(Kingsley Amis wrote a story on a similar theme called Dear Illusion, about a poet who knowingly writes inept poetry that is lauded by the critics.)  

The Dreadnought Hoax.   Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury mates pretended to be Abyssinian royalty and were entertained by the Royal Navy on HMS Dreadnought.  I don't think it was that amusing, because I suppose the Navy officers had no choice but to be civil to foreign guests, but the fact that Virginia Woolf did this blacked up, bearded and in drag makes it stand out among hoaxes.  The Navy chaps gave the instigator, a poet and constant prankster called Horace de Vere Cole,  a token smack with a cane afterwards to satisfy their honour.

Virginia Woolf is at the far left

These days our armed forces have dwindled in size and power so a hoax on them would be silly childishness, whereas a successful hoax on, say, the Daily Mail or Simon Cowell, would delight a chunk of the British public.

The Conquest Letter.  I can't find a link for this but Kingsley Amis recounts it in his Memoirs. 

Robert Conquest, another poet and prankster and a distinguished Sovietologist, sent a letter to Philip Larkin marked HMG and stating that Larkin's collection of  pornography was to be investigated by officialdom.  Larkin dashed off to his solicitor's office and spent the whole day hiding there.  He later billed Conquest for the solicitor's time.   This event didn't spoil their friendship.   Conquest is a prolific writer and has been married four times.  He must have a lot of excess energy.

Philip Larkin wrote (bad) pornography himself, so there seems to be some justice in this hoax. 

My sister L. This was not a pure hoax, more of a wind up but L took a snapshot to school of a heart-throb pop-star, sitting right up close and smiling at her.  In fact, she had got a picture from a magazine, pinned it up on the garage wall and photographed that.  It did look very convincing for those who hadn't seen her other snaps, where she was inclined to cut off people's heads, or catch them as blurs in the corner.  This was funny and harmless.  If she had gone to school and said, for instance, that our mother had cancer, that would have been more in line with the Muchausen syndrome school of hoaxing, that is, unhealthily seeking attention.

Myself.  Once as art critic for a kind of Time Out magazine I did a piece of deliberate pretentious nonsense about an exhibition I'd seen - no-one spotted it but then I think no-one read it.   The magazine's editors thought they should cover exhibitions and as everyone else had snaffled the music side they gave that spot to me.  I should say I was, and am, fairly indifferent to painting and sculpture.  Those who like them should enjoy the Van Meergen hoax.  He faked a Vermeer which met an art critic's theory that Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting.  Van Meegeren was happy with this result which confirmed what he had come to think about the Dutch art establishment and then found he could sell a phony Vermeer for a fortune so carried on faking.

The televisual hoaxer Ali G.  I can't stand the unfunny little arse and when he interviewed people who were very polite to him no matter how stupid and crass his questions, I was on their side.  I think the real dupes of his hoax were the idiots who found him entertaining.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - all right, drop the jokey tone.  The fact that this fraud is taken seriously still as a view of how the world works makes me howl.

So - a good hoax fulfils a victim's wishful thinking.  It's easy to see why Hamas loves the Protocols, why the Sokal hoaxees believed a real proper physicist endorsed their views about science and why the Australian avant-garde grabbed hold of their very own Dylan Thomas.  

The Gay Girl in Damascus is not a classic hoax since it was not created to show up the main dupes, the well-meaning progressives who sympathise with Syrian protesters.  The hoaxer Tom MacMaster is pleased with himself for adopting a persona that was so convincing it fooled his readers, but there's no sense that he's laughing at them for setting up and signing petitions demanding Amina's release from a Syrian jail.   MacMaster's  idea of wit is sarcastic jeering (common among activists).  One thing he does say is that his false blog exposed the "liberal Orientalism" of the west. 

Heresy Corner interprets :-

The clue to what he was playing at lies in the phrase "liberal Orientalism". It's not clear what liberal orientalism he thought he was exposing - perhaps it was the concern some (but not all) western liberals display for the plight of gay people and women in repressive Islamic societies. A perception which, of course, made "Amina" such a brave and representative heroine. It's even possible that he was deliberately creating a character who would prove irresistible to Western liberals, someone around whom they could unite - as indeed, for a time, they did.

MacMaster's own brand of liberal Orientalism, however, seems to have been of a different order - the celebration of an idealised Islamic society characterised above all by tolerance, pluralism and freedom. A picture entirely at odds with the burkhas and beheadings image perpetuated by that other sort of "orientalism" that sees Islam as irredeemably backward and savage. [The whole article is worth reading].

The "liberal orientalism" motive looks like an afterthought.  What the Gay Girl resembles is another literary counterfeit, the poems of Ossian.   A writer who cannot advance his works by their own merits passes them off as having been written by a more romantic figure.  MacMaster used the  beautiful lesbian rebel Amina, James MacPherson a druidlike bard called Ossian.  Both met the taste of their times. Amina's protest, authenticity and identity politics are much admired in modern culture. Macpherson's eighteenth century had developed a new interest in an ancient and native literature.  In Scotland this was "heightened by post-1745 nostalgic romanticisation of all things relating to the Highlands," (the progenitor of today's tourist industry).  Many contemporary Scots passionately wanted to believe in Scotland's antique literary heritage.   

Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes

The Gay Girl is a writer's hoax - of wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, because MacMaster does believe that his own work is of high quality that just needs a publishing break.  He also has strong sympathies with the Syrian uprising and so he coupled a writer's vanity with the unscrupulousness of a politico who feels justified in lying and forgery for a good cause.   

Samuel Johnson was famously sceptical about the Ossian poems which he called "an imposture" and what he said about  MacPherson goes for MacMaster, going by this interview:-

stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.

Forces of history

So leave the flat I own - and no man had to countersign my mortgage, as would have happened before the 1970s.  Thank you feminism.  Go to work where they can’t fire me without jumping through a lot of hoops - so here’s to you employment legislation and trade unions that pressed for it.  Hang out in the pub with male friends - there you go, changing social customs.  I’m grateful to  a good state school system for my education - my parents both left school at fourteen.  

So when this African immigrant chambermaid went to her employers and the New York police because, she says, a rich important white man had assaulted her, what forces lay behind that action.  The civil rights movement for black equality.  Rights of employment.  Feminist consciousness raising that put about the notion that a woman’s body is her own possession.  An idea that in the USA everyone, high or low, is supposed to be subject to the law.  Perhaps even the knowledge that Barrack Obama, president of the USA. is of recent immigrant stock (so recent, that his enemies insist he wasn’t born in the USA at all).

This makes people like Bernard-Henri Levy with his indignation that his superior friend, Strauss-Khan, should be treated like other people and Jean-François Kahn and his "Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help” seem to be from a very ancien regime - the age of chivalry, say, where you‘d parade your romantic devotion to a grand lady and then think nothing of raping a peasant.  To the tumbrils, both of them.

Update:-

One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.

The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.

Read the whole article and follow some of the links eg here:-

Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,” will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may end up getting fired.

Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”

I do remember when I was young working as a waitress and customers thinking it was all right to stroke me, as if I was a pet cat.  I'm sorry I didn't spill their food all over them.

When news items clash

Out of his Time

I recently read WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, which is thriller journalism. Kingsley Amis once said, “I’m never going to read another novel that doesn’t begin with the words, ‘A shot rang out."  The authors, David Leigh and Luke Harding give that kind of bang with their opening lines:- “Glimpsed in the half-light of a London evening, the figure just might have passed as female.  She  emerged from the doorway and folded herself into a battered red car.”  It’s a rattling good yarn, a riveting  read, a real page turner and so on.  Julian Assange is definitely someone you couldn’t make up, and what with the cache of secrets, the USA coming down on him, the rape charges and the squabbles, splits and falling outs decent journalists like Leigh and Harding can’t fail but make an exciting story out of it all. 


At the end of last year a zillion words hysterically denounced or adulated Assange.    He was in the running to be Time’s Man of the Year.  The Italian Rolling Stone had him on their cover.  He was as famous as a rock star but famous for doing something serious and important and after all, it’s passe to regard rock stars as rebellious outsiders.  There was a feeling that on this new ocean of the internet which has barely been charted as yet Assange was Master and Commander, but also a pirate.

He was "a symbol of revolutionary action", and “on the way of becoming an equal to Che Guevara, while using the most powerful weapon of the new age - information.”  Also, what put the sparklers on his cake was that he was really pissing off the USA.

Here’s John Wight with a piece on Socialist Unity entitled God‘s Lonely Man:-

The global impact this single individual’s actions have had  . . . may well be one of the most historically significant events of our time. In revealing the machinations of governments, with the US government at the centre of a global network of economic and geopolitical manoeuvring for advantage, Wikileaks has stripped bare democracy, diplomacy and international relations of any pretence to reveal the true nature of how power and empire operates.

One man in effect has rattled the foundations of the most powerful country the world has ever known to an extent no army or rival military power ever has or would dare attempt.

Assange, it seems clear, is a man driven by a messianic anger at how governments operate behind closed doors, how power functions and how society is controlled by that power. Secrecy as practised by the powerful is for him not a shield but a sword, used to conceal state driven and sponsored crimes in pursuit of power or advantage regardless of the social or human cost. Alienated from a world set up by and for the interests of the rich and powerful, Assange may well have arrived on the stage of history as the living example of the maxim of ‘cometh the time, cometh the man.’

Imperial machinations lay hid from sight,/Julian made Wikileaks and then there was light. I read that piece, and thought, that is the kind of paean the comes round to bite you in the bum.   However, John Wight did once have ambitions of being a Hollywood script writer.    It must have been tempting to story-board Assange, with his aura of romance, the man who lives in his laptop, with no material possessions, no fixed abode, a gypsy and a nomad,  like the guy in the Western who sorts out the troubles of the small town which is being menaced by ruthless crooks then rejects the girl and moves on.  The USA took on the role of the corrupt and bullying gang and beset him from all sides.  High up politicians and media mouths called for his arrest or even his assassination, MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal at the American government’s request, tried to cut off his supplies.  So he seemed both the free man, and the responsible man, the outlaw and the saviour, and  ruthless forces were opposing him.

On the left there is a hero gap.  Che is dead, Castro too old, Ortega is compromised, and Chavez is a bit of a buffoon. Enter Assange to fill the space.  His appearance adds to the mystique.  He is pale, and looks slightly alien and that along with his giant computer-like brain gives him the air of someone from a science fiction world, some sister planet of Vulcan where they have not evolved pointed ears.  He came as the man of mystery and enigma.

I’ve been told by chaps that their latest love object was “enigmatic”.  The enigmatic one was always good looking - enigmatic plain women don’t seem to exist, or at least, as in Bishop Berkeley’s riddle of the tree falling in a wood - are not seen to exist.   Her enigma was that she didn’t say an awful lot, and so suggested significance.  Then when she did open her gob you realised that if not very bright she was at least wise enough to keep that gob shut as a rule.

Assange, however, opened his gob and said really annoying things.  I first heard him speak on the Today programme in reply to John Humphrys:-

Q: Are you a sexual predator?

JA: That's ridiculous. Of course not.

Q: How many women have you slept with?

JA: That's a private business. Not only does a gentleman not tell, not only does a gentleman like to talk about his private life, a gentleman certainly doesn't count.

Blehh! to that self-declared chivalry.  However, it is impossible for a bloke to say, “I’m very attractive to women and have slept with lots of them.” without someone wanting to smack him.  Try it in the pub some time if you don’t believe it.

There were other utterances of Assange that diminished his herohood.

On a dating site:-  “WARNING: Want regular, down to earth guy?  Keep moving.  I am not the droid you are looking for.  Save us both while you can.  Passionate, and often pig-headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy.”

Assange was 36 when he wrote that, not 16.  He called himself “Harry Harrison”, and his adoption of the name of the inventor of the Stainless Steel Rat says something about his  tendencies to video gaming fantasy.   If he is a hero it is one who visualises to himself at what angle and in what folds his cape falls.

He once quoted from Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle: “To feel that home is the camaraderie of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist slave labour camp! How close the parallels to my own adventures! … Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! To see through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still slavishly follow with their hearts! … Your belief in the mendacity of the state … begins only with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when led into the dock and referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms ‘the prisoner shall now rise’ and no one else in the room stands.”

He sniffed this Gulag when he was fined $2100 for hackery in an Australian court, the judge taking into account his chaotic upbringing and his lack of profit motive.  So going by his own words Assange is a fantasist who regards himself as God’s gift to women.  Given Assange’s view of “scientific journalism”  his own words should be fairly damning.  Out of his own mouth and in his own wwriting he doesn‘t do himself much credit.

However second-hand information- Leigh and Harding‘s book - builds him up again. I got a picture of someone with piles of courage, intense powers of concentration - he can programme for 48 hours on the trot - indifference to material comfort- he barely eats - yes, we lazy telly watching mortgage slaves should feel some awe for this.  As for Wikileaks itself, it’s a huge thing to bite off, those great mounds of data which needs sorting and sifting.  Assange does attract clever energetic activists to his side, but they and the data presumably have to be closely vetted, since I’m willing to believe that there are infiltrating agents and false data dumped on him.  By itself Wikileaks won‘t save the world.  But information is important and it is a great achievement to create a sanctuary where data can be sent protected by encryption and the leaker can stay untraced . 

Assange is meant to be a great brainbox, the avatar of algorithms, a brilliant hacker who thought he’d put his gifts to some kind of humanitarian use.  Hackers often hack just for the sheer schoolboyish pleasure of being one over the headmaster, of outwitting the security guards.  There are some who become criminals and crack open credit card accounts, some become security guards themselves, poachers to gamekeepers, while Assange thought he would turn his exceptional skills to the public good. 

By getting control of the Wikileaks data he becomes a power himself.  His world view, which may be the same as the bloke who programmes at your place of work, then starts to matter.  His fantasies about himself which are no worse than any video gamer’s, start to look a little irresponsible.  Would you trust your data with this guy?  He is prone to think critics are conspirators, and disgruntled colleagues conmen and traitors.  However he has loyal supporters on side and probably keen young idealists dream of being one of his helpers.  He may eventually adjust to living in the kind of publicity he’s been getting, as he moved from the land of programming and small scale activism to the land of celebrity and a piss-taking media.

I can imagine him in another time, say 1942.  He’s in a Nissan hut eating a slice of Spam, his first meal for three days.  He and Alan Turing have been going through rivers of print outs of code, trying to make patterns out of what look like gobbledegook to most of us.  He is with his peers of brilliant analytical brains, the kind of person who relaxes by playing five mental chess games simultaneously.  Assange is an odd fish, but many of these boffins are odd fish.  Some of the nastier public school types take the piss out of his Downunder accent and ways eg treating everyone whatever their rank without deference.  But they all admit he can decrypt with the best of ‘em.

Joan, one of the filing clerks, has nicknamed him “Mr Sponge”, because, she says, of his habit of standing closer than necessary to you as if he was about to wipe you down. But Muriel and Enid have a soft spot for the Aussie Assange, thinking he needs feeding up and offering him bits of their chocolate ration.

That was in other times, when it was clear to what effort a decent person’s energies should be exerted and where their loyalties lay.  Those were secret times, when someone would work for Bletchley Park and never mention this to anyone, not forty years later on, not to their husband or wife. 

Assange though is not apolitical.  He has been shocked by the grey slums he has seen in English cities, and he knows that the world is in a mess, and scientists are the best fitted to sort it out.  He has read the  great scientist, J D Bernal,  who says that there is a country covering one sixth of the earth where justice reigns.  Knowing this is for the ultimate good of mankind as well as making him one up on some of the snotty establishment figures he has met he starts punting a few secrets towards Josef Stalin.