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.
I'm not particularly a fan of Assange, but as with a lot of writing on him, especially at Harry's Place, the anti-Assange hysteria sems to be caused by his apparent position as some sort of 'hero of the left' as you discuss above.
I simply don't see this in the mainstream UK press, or indeed on the mainstream left. A piece by John Pilger which isn't all that supportive, a cover of, er, Italian Rolling Stone, and a few posts on Socialist Unity?
I don't really buy it. 1942 analogies aside, what is the actual problem people have with him?
Posted by: organic cheeseboard | 12 April 2011 at 09:33 AM
The Hindustan Times was a little scathing about it - not a hero, but a god.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Listening-to-the-voice-of-God-in-Kensington/Article1-684060.aspx
Most Britons don’t do God very well. Although the overwhelming majority of them described themselves as Christians in the last census 10 years ago, fewer than 6% of Christians actually turn up for service on Sundays.
But things were looking good for Man Upstairs last Saturday afternoon in this land
of atheists, as close to 800 people queued outside Kensington Town Hall in west-central London to hear the words of God.
For nearly two hours young men and women turned the massive public auditorium into their own temple of democracy, stomping, clapping and whistling in adoration of the man they had come to hear, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
I would guess that those young men and women would regard themselves as being on the left.
Surely you remember last year when the rape charges surfaced, good leftist feminists like Naomi Wolf forgot their feminism in favour of their leftism to dump on the women who had made the charges? If you look at posts on Liberal Conspiracy at the time you can see the accusations of CIA stooge chucked at anyone who suggested that perhaps these charges should be investigated?
In fact in the post on Liberal Conspiracy on JA's anti-semitism, his admirers flock, asking that his side of the story should be told - which as some of the commenters say, wasn't allowed to the alleged rape victims, who were dismissed out of hand.
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/03/01/assange-goes-off-deep-end-blaming-jews-and-guardian-in-private-eye/
This issue of the New Statesman, the classical journal of the left, carries a fairly dull essay by him as one of its big features. JA can't write and he isn't really a man of ideas. But he has this spread because of his status as the Data Receiver.
So, I think his hero status among the left is well established. Quite a lot of it is deserved in fact, as I pointed out in my piece.
Posted by: Rosie | 12 April 2011 at 08:59 PM