October 5, 2021 - 10:28am
Julian Assange has always been a curious figure — an extreme narcissist with a penchant for winding up political elites — but he was extremely good at what he did. He was the engine behind Wikileaks, which turned 15 yesterday, and since his arrest, nothing of note has really appeared on the site.
In some respect Wikileaks was a victim of its own success. It has been outpaced by the institutions whose failures once left a void for it to fill — but were inspired by its methods. This week, the Pandora Papers were leaked to the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The ICIJ then shared access the same groups that Wikileaks once did: The Guardian, BBC Panorama, Le Monde and the Washington Post. They did not require a maverick, or intrigue, to become news. Nor did they have to consent to Assange’s anarchist world view. The Pandora Papers’ antecedents, the Panama Papers, also came via the ICIJ.
Perhaps what happened to Wikileaks is a mirror of what happened all over the net around 2007: spiky one-man bands, kickstarted by charismatic nut jobs, replaced by more consumer-friendly versions. MySpace was muscled out by Facebook. Napster gave way to the Spotify era. Invariably, when consumers had a choice, the values of commerce and bland solidity re-asserted themselves.
And nowadays, you don’t have to be Julian Assange to be an online sleuth. Just as in 2021 you don’t build a shop website with your own developer team, you buy it pre-built from a Squarespace, making your need for Wikileaks to host your tranche of government data quite unnecessary.
You might say that real value creation by WikiLeaks was always in branding the stories. In filleting gigabytes of data into headline nuggets that normal people could consume; then creating a big enough media cyclone to launch often dry data into the news cycle.
In this, Wikileaks were initially way out ahead. But as the years have rolled the eccentric personality of Assange and his interesting line in martyrdom have gone from being the subject of Andrew O’Hagan biographies to a tragi-comic sideshow.
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SubscribeAssange was never the maverick he claimed. His focus was always on leaks that supported his left-wing positions. So he was very keen on Edward Snowden because these leaks damaged the west, but there was no way he’d ever have sought or posted anything about, oh, Putin organising Novichok assassinations in Salisbury, for example.
He also tried to suppress the Climategate leaks. You’d think if he were really a fan of impartial transparency, he’d have wanted to publish details of climate scientists trying to “hide the decline” rather than suppress them. It’s almost as though he’s in favour of transparency or not according to whether it supports his bien pensant left wing views.
His support for openness is like Jeremy Corbyn’s pacifism and anti-racism. He’s in favour of disarming the west but not the IRA; he’s opposed to racism unless it’s against Jews, who deserve it.
The best place for someone like Assange probably is jail, really. As the article makes clear, nobody misses him, and women are safer that way.
Very well said.
Regarding your first paragraph, I have always found the Salisbury poisonings peculiar! The Russian government would have known that the daughter was visiting her father at that time and it was a pretty botched job. Also the reason given for finding a scent bottle with the poison in it in a Chemist shop a good distance away from the first crime was hard to believe. However no one else seems to think the same way as me!!.
I’m reading Mark Urban’s book on this so he may suggests otherwise but my assumption is that the ineptitude of the Litvinov and Skripal poisonings was deliberate. It conveyed the key point that the Russian government is prepared to murder its critics anywhere. An unfortunate car accident would not have the same profile, and might not even be noticed. Using a poison only a government could obtain, in contrast, tells you that the Russian state orders, equips and contrives hits, and you can’t avoid them by leaving Russia.
You can tell this article is a defence of the war criminals which Wikileaks exposed by the ad hominem way it begins. No need to read any further.
You don’t really get credit for exposing dodgy people unless you do so without fear or favour, though. Nobody would ever accuse Assange of leaking without partiality, so he’s just the latter-day equivalent of those useful CND idiots who wanted to disarm only the West.
From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian, by Richard Craven, a sonnet happily superseded by events:-
Sonnet 151
He’s to be scoped, the r@pey narcissist,
athwart on camp-bed with a cigarette,
recalling ruefully his Swedish tryst.
It’s pretty gamey in that oubliette,
and latterly his visitors are few
and low status: just junior attachés
and interns. No more television crews
now camp beneath his balcony; that craze
of troubadour paying court to caytiff king
has passed. Now Julian’s the apostate,
there’ll be an end of virtue-signalling.
Let Cumberbatch and Gaga find new mates;
the creep will linger like a nasty smell
inside his Ecuadorian hotel.