Once more  about Assange

I hope this is the  last time I update this. 

So Julian Assange  has finally been sprung. I waited a little while to do this revision of the Assange story. I hope it is the last one. 

I wanted to wait until  the fuss  has died down about his release. It may then  be  easier for some people to think objectively about his case. I hope  he will now fade into obscurity. 

I  have always  had an aversion to  martyrdom cults  built  around  self harming attention seekers. The Assange cult has been the ultimate such cult. That is why I have had this morbid fascination with him. 

I have been following Assange’s misadventures  since he  was first charged  back in 2010. This is one of the oldest  articles I have written that I still have. I have  revised and up dated it the most times. 

I even wrote a fiction story based on Assange. It is pretty good. It is set in a time  and place where they did  real human sacrifices,  not just judicial ones. It illustrates very well what the  Assange following is  about. 

Even before  Assange  was released, I  could  see a  waning of support for him. This  would be a major reason why   they finally decided to release  him. The  negatives to the secret services, in keeping the show going, were starting to outweigh the advantages. 

Many people became  fed up with the industry built  around Assange. He was making some lawyers  rich. But you could tell that  these people began to be pushed  aside in that last year. 

He got some  new lawyers  who began doing some  real negotiating. They dropped the legalistic  arguments  which were pointless with a  totally corrupt court system. 

Finally, an exit plan was worked out. The Americans agreed to drop their  charges against him. He had to fly to some  American  island possession in the Pacific for  an American judge to validate this. 

As a parting insult, they tried to bill him half a million dollars for chartering the airliner to take him back to Australia. After that, we have not heard much from him. 

He likely does not have much money. He is unlikely to get much compensation from the British courts  for fourteen years of  illegal detention. He would have to sue in the same crooked  court system which perpetrated the tort. 

He will  likely have to start  flogging a book  and doing speaking tours. I do not think this will bring him any great amount of money. As I said, the Assange cult seems to be fading away. 

His followers are beginning to realize the  toxic aspects  of his personality and what his real opinions  are on a lot of things. It is starting to be noticed  that he has also made many ridiculous decisions to get himself into the position he was in. I will discuss these below. 

There is some concern about the bad legal precedent set by Assange’s “plea deal”. It was  thought to create problems for journalists. It legitimated the Americans  charging foreign  citizens in American courts. 

I  am not impressed  by legal precedents. Judges in   the “common law” court  system   generally do what they want, regardless of any precedent. A precedent is considered law until somebody decides it is no longer a precedent. 

It is as I parodied in my short story about sacrificial victims. Assange was the perfect martyr;  a dope with a need for attention, an unrealistic idea of his competence, and a warped understanding of right. Yet  as in my short fiction, he was aligned with the globalists until  he somehow went off the team.

He seemed to believe at the start that he was going to force the establishment to mend its ways, so we could all go back to some ideal time in the past when there was a democracy. Much of his following are also people who imagine there was some ideal time in the past when there was political freedom.

Like many mildly autistic people, he is charismatic. He has attracted a large following who have become obsessed about him, building him up into something he definitely is not.

The best illustration of the delusional nature of the cult built up around Assange is the statement some of these people made, while he  was captive, that “freeing Assange would free the world.” So Assange is now free. Nothing has changed. We still live under capitalist hegemony. 

All the journalists in the world, all the ‘whistleblowing’, will change nothing. This delusion only leads plenty of people to get themselves into trouble for nothing. A revolution removing the present order and establishing a better one is the only thing which will change this.

Assange’s persecution served several purposes for The Shadow. One was as an ongoing warning to anyone who exposes anything which really causes it inconvenience. For this purpose, it was much better to keep Assange in limbo, parading him before  the court every few months.

If they had finally ordered the Kangaroo Kourts to send him off to some dungeon for 200 years, that would have been the end of it. People would have  largely forgot about him, as with Leonard Peltier or Jumia Al Jabar. 

Assange was a useful distraction. Huge time and resources are spent maintaining this cult, which could be directed to more useful things. But as I said, people were getting tired of it. Not just The Forces of Darkness, but the cult  as well. 

The dark forces could have finally sent him off to a dungeon in America, or they  might have  arranged a stroke for him. But they decided to just turn him loose. 

It might have been the most cunning move.  People might finally see   what  a fool he is. Of course, some would simply find a new martyr to obsess over, if one was on offer. 

I  must make a point about  defense lawyers in political trials. I myself have been a defendant in such  proceedings. They are usually scum. 

The ethical course for a lawyer, if confronted with a rigged proceeding, where the judges are not even going to make a pretense of following rules, where there is no chance of justice, is to call it out, and walk out. There is nothing he or she can do there except help create an illusion of a legitimate proceeding. If Assange’s lawyers had just walked out, the Kangaroos would have been in a bind. 

For fourteen years, since the world would not stop telling me about Prince Julian, I kept telling the world my view of him.

If there is one useful thing about Assange, it is that he is a good start point to talk about what is wrong with various liberal ideas. I am not here going deep into all these ideas.

At core is the idea that we live in a democracy, or there has ever been a democracy in the west in modern times, or the present institutions are a model for a democracy. We live under a capitalist oligarchy.

Assange has imagined that he is a journalist. He is also styled as a whistleblower and as a champion of free speech. Journalists are usually not useful people and the two concepts above are specious.

Further to that, I have this brief advice for anyone considering “blowing the whistle”. Ask the following questions:

Does the party you are spilling the beans to have the power to correct the malfeasance? No?

Does it have the power to protect you from retaliation? No?

Then do not do it.

We do not live in freedom. Achieving it will require the overthrow of the hegemonic power. That is a huge topic in itself. “Exposing” any misdeeds of the hegemony will do nothing toward overthrowing it.

Mostly, they do not care if they are exposed. Trying to expose them merely exposes you as a problem, to be managed or eliminated. Or, something to make a spectacle and distraction out of.

It is now generally accepted that Assange is on the light end of the autism spectrum, the Asperger’s end. Asperger’s is common in tech nerds, but also in political activists. There is some buzz that he a member of  some sort of cult. Establishment  types  tend to be part of  obscure cults or secret societies. 

He is said to be very arrogant, moving furniture around and taking things off tables. He dyes  his hair white, and  tries to deny that he does it. He eventually alienates all his collaborators.

His real views tend toward right wing libertarianism. He started Wikileaks  as some sort of cutout for the British secret services. Thus it is strange that he is so fervently supported by so many hard left and green left people. 

In his teen years, Assange made himself into “Mendax the Hacker”. Mendax is a latin word meaning “liar”. After the police caught up with him and his jolly crew, 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, the first of many he  has inspired.

The foundation and original purpose of Wikileaks is a very big  puzzle. Assange is held out as its sole founder, which does not seem to be the case. It seems to have been originally presented as a collective for people who  wanted to be investigative journalists. 

It seems several of these people left it in its early years, complaining about Assange’s ego problems. They were also concerned  about his lack of a sense of limits. Especially, he  resisted the usual practice of editing out  names  from documents, to protect  privacy. 

One of Wikileak’s first  actions was to assist the British Spooks in fomenting a ‘color revolution’ in Kenya. They are the world’s experts  at this kind of thing.

In 2007, Various western interests  were becoming annoyed  with the Kenyan president, Arap Moi.  They tried to generate a corruption scandal to drive him out. With local Kenyan help, an American consulting firm created The Kroll Report. 

The reports contents were secret. It was  released years later and  found to contain nothing of substance. Of course by then the  harm was done. 

This mysterious ‘Mars group’ worked to create bloody riots against Moi, in an attempt to turn the Kenyan elections. They were supported by  a Kenyan branch of Wikileaks, which  Assange had registered under the name “John Shipton”. That is the name of his biological father, whom he had never met. 

Moi won the election anyway. The riots kept going, and  some lawfare was started. Finally Moi caved in and quit. 

Assange  then  bragged  about  bringing the Moi government  down, exaggerating his role. He seemed to think he had done a great thing for Kenyan democracy. 

Somehow between 2007  and 2010 Assange and British Intelligence  became enemies. It is unclear  as to why, but  Assange  has shown a pattern of doing very stupid things to land himself in increasing trouble. 

He at times talked about Wikileaks being the ‘intelligence service for the public’. Thus 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 against, 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. Or, to complicate his own egal case. 

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 had provided information. 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 neighbors: 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 could have been his last way out of the trap he was in. It is lucky for him it was not. 

Yet he was not done doing stupid things to mess himself up. In 2017, he chose to act  as the front for the group who  exposed the American CIA’s  “vault  seven” tools. These  were a set of  software tools which enabled  CIA to carry out  various nefarious activities on the net. 

The people  who did  this seemed to have been some disgruntled former CIA people. They covered their own tracks  quite well, but chose to use Assange and Wikileaks  as  a front. This now got the American spooks very  angry with Assange. They laid their own charges against him, which gave the British Kangaroos  new pretenses to keep him in  jail. 

There is one more Assange blunder   worth pointing out. He blew the cover of Bradley, as she then was, Manning. Chelsea eventually realized she  would likely not have  been caught if Assange had not  handled her information on his personal devices. It is ironic that they likely used the same tools on Assange’s  laptop that he later exposed.

There is yet another  aspect to this story I was not aware of until recently. While Assange  sat  under house arrest and in the embassy, two movies were made  about him. Neither  were particularly flattering toward him, but this did  not  seem to  matter to the cult. 

I have not seen either of these two films, and have no plan to make a plan to  view them. 

One is called “Underground: The Julian Assange story”. It was released in 2012 for Australian television. It was  about the  hunt for Julian and his fellow teenage hackers during the  1980s. For some reason Julian liked this film.

The other is called “The Fifth Estate”. It was released in 2013  as a feature film by a subsidiary of Walt Disney. Julian did not like this one. Some reviewers liked it, calling it an  exposition of what is wrong with journalism and the “fifth Estate”. 

And finally, there is now an industry in making documentaries  about Assange. All seem to be hagiographies. 

I will conclude this post with a brief discussion of my view of what is wrong with Journalism. However, the topic is worth a blog post of its own. That will come. 

Most journalism and journalists  is and are garbage. Perhaps  five percent of them do some good work,  especially by going to areas under attack by imperial forces and reporting what is happening. Most  useful journalism is not about  researching or investigating anything, but  just drawing attention to the obvious. 

Journalists will pompously call themselves a “fifth estate”, as though they were something important to democracy. And, as though  there is a real democracy. They have no business setting themselves up as  being in control of information and  public perception. Most of them are  mere propagandists. 

One of the first steps in establishing a real democracy is  to shut down  the ‘free press’. There is nothing  free  about it. We need a system of public information. 

One voice, one reality, run as a public utility. This does not mean a ministry of truth.  To be functional, it must be  accurate  and credible. 

Now, I hope this long story has come to an end. Assange is back in Australia. I hope he manages to stay out of trouble. More importantly, to avoid getting anyone else in trouble. 

But no, I think he will keep  trying to draw attention to himself. But public interest in him will continue to decline.