The evil madman Assange and his No 1 groupie, Pilger
Just in case you didn’t read Nick Cohen’s brilliant demolition of the thoroughly evil mental case Assange, in the Observer this Sunday:
“The betrayals and treachery of Julian Assange
“You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange‘s half-educated condemnations of the American “military-industrial complex” to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
“As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern…”
Read the rest here
And here is a splendid denunciation of Assange’s No 1 groupie, Pilger:
“It is a curious journey that Pilger has undertaken. But it is one that shows
what happens when you abandon critical thought to allow a predetermined
narrative to overcome any commitment to principle you might have once had and
try to shoehorn a messy
reality into a tidy explanation that suits your prejudices. Thinking back to
my early admiration, I can only see it as a tragedy, not a farce.”
Pilger links here
In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Kni said,
September 21, 2011 at 2:20 pm
In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death – yet another lie.
The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks
Rosie said,
September 21, 2011 at 7:23 pm
This is a bit overstated. If you call Assange “an evil madman” where does that leave Col. Gaddaffi and A Hitler (not to mention Fred West)? Assange has half-baked ideas, he’s a bit weird, he’s egocentric and he’s not a man to trust with your sensitive data, but “evil madman” is OTT.
As for Nick Cohen’s piece on him – it was a lazy bit of writing using info that Harry’s Place ran 9 months ago.
There is a big topic of where whistleblowers should send any data they might get hold of. It should probably be with some good journalist who specialises in the area that the data deals with rather than big data dumps like Wikileaks, but I do realise that there are issues of security and traceability. With this kind of thing you need a tech head with access to a server in a country which can’t be bullied to divulge who is keeping the data where.
The Wikileaks/Guardian relationship and the book Wikileaks by David Leigh & Luke Harding demonstrate that journalists and tech heads who are into revealing data aren’t necessarily going to get on.
charliethechulo said,
September 23, 2011 at 1:49 am
Disgraceful! Someone has leaked Assange’s autobiography without his permission; here’s his statement:
http://wikileaks.org/Julian-Assange-Statement-on-the.html