Not the Messiah They’re Telling You

Frankly, I’d hoped to avoid having to write anything about Julian Assange, I really had. Unfortunately, the puzzling fangirling of so many on the right for this unpleasant propagandist, and their strangely credulous willingness to parrot the talking-points of the left, conspired to force my hand.

Many years ago, the great, actual, Australian journalist, Jack Marx, pondered the strange Cult of Assange. As Marx wrote, Assange never struck him as any kind of “freedom fighter”, or “fearless truth-teller” in the least. Rather, Marx said, Assange seemed more like an adolescent petty-criminal, motivated mostly by “the thrill of the late-night smash-and-grab” and the subsequent bragging rights.

When Marx wrote, Assange fangirling was entirely a left-wing phenomenon. Today, a curious number on the right have jumped on the bandwagon, not least Tucker Carlson. Which is particularly curious, given that Assange is a self-confessed traitor to the US.

Finally, at long last, Julian Assange has confessed to being a traitor. For who else disseminates our military or diplomatic secrets in a time of excruciating and bloodcurdling wars he never had to fight, bleed for, or watch his friends die in, and does so with unabashed “look at me” abandon?

Materials he disseminated without a conscious thought for the safety of the people or methods named in the documents he paraded, without a thought to anyone’s actual lives. Documents that, in the hands of a journalist, would have been equally revealed but with ethical and moral guardianship.

OK, the last sentence goes a little overboard on the self-regard. Let’s not forget that much of the media willfully conspired to conceal the truth of the Hunter Biden laptop, for instance. But he has a point about ethics: journalistic ethics makes clear that journalists must do their best to protect subjects from physical harm. Dumping highly-sensitive documents, unredacted, naming many people in highly risky positions, is grossly unethical. The potential for harm was grotesque and massive.

Indeed, earlier this year, a British court was told that “people who had to leave their homes, flee their homelands, because they had been identified in the state department cables”. Barrister Clair Dobbin KC, acting for the US, also stated that there were “individuals who have subsequently disappeared since the publication of the cables”.

Wikileaks is accused of publishing private medical records, including of patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees, and naming teenage rape victims. They’re also accused of publishing the full details of a Saudi man arrested for homosexuality, in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, frequently extra-judicial. In the US, people named in Wikileaks dumps complained that they had subsequently suffered identity theft.

None of which has ever seemed to bother Assange. All of that is, according to him, “not even worth a headline”. Even early in his career, presented with evidence that Wikileaks material led to deaths in Africa, Assange airily dismissed the killings as “collateral damage”.

As we have said before in the pages of this publication, there is a worthy, storied place for whistleblowers with the courage to stand up against those who wish to conceal secrets that should be made public – the ugly truths that must be told.

But at some feverish and ludicrous point, Assange went from theatre, to farce, to tragedy. Until, finally, his story became about a sad little man with seemingly agonising personal issues who thought he was somehow more divine than the world of realpolitik he egotistically bumbled into […]

Assange sought to defraud the public, and his acolytes, into thinking he represented our journalistic profession. A profession some of us have lived or died for. Assange doesn’t have a clue where free speech begins nor ends. He doesn’t know when not to cry “fire” in a crowded theatre. He’s merely a digital garbage bin behind the great halls of true reporting. Indeed, he even derided on Twitter to never wanting to identify as a journalist. Undermining, one supposes, not only his legal defence but his own manufactured sense of identity and purpose.

Indeed, one of the few times Assange could be said to have actually attempted to engage in journalism, the result was outright propaganda. The so-called “collateral murder” video is a deeply-deceptive effort, from start to finish. It withholds key information and frames the story to push a narrative, not report the facts.

The facts are that US troops in an area of Baghdad had been hit with small arms fire all day. Some time later, a group of people, none of whom wears anything identifying themselves as media, and several of them carrying small arms, are spotted in the street. One crouches behind a corner and points a long, black, cylindrical object at the circling helicopter. Not unreasonably, the helicopter crew suspect it’s a rocket launcher.

At all times, the crew strictly follow their rules of engagement, reporting to their superiors and awaiting an all-clear before opening fire.

An unfortunate tragedy in a confused, urban warfare theatre? Certainly. “Murder”, absolutely not. Nor is it even conceivably a “war crime”.

Yet, this deceptive propaganda is supposed to be Wikileaks’ crowning achievement?

It’s beyond time we deprive Assange the attention he craves like the oxygen we breathe. There remain, and will continue to emerge, true whistleblowers to laud. It’s in them our energies and devotion must lie. Not in vacuous hacking vessels who crossed lines too numerous to count.

The Australian

The fact remains that Assange’s fixations on transparency in government have been largely limited to exposure of US government excesses and outrages while maintaining a softly, softly approach on some of the world’s worst autocracies.

Russia, it’s immediately obvious. It’s worth pondering how many of Assange’s legion of fangirls have decorated their online profiles with dinky Ukrainian flags, and how they square that with Assange’s defense of the Kremlin as a supposed “bulwark against Western imperialism”.

It’s also worth pondering how those who make, without any evidence at all, ludicrous claims of assassination plots against Assange, with his support for a regime which has very likely really assassinated its opposition.

The prevailing view is that ­Assange is more Putin’s useful idiot than stooge, motivated not by lofty ideals of government accountability and transparency but by evening up old scores and settling personal vendettas.

The Australian

As the incessant gushing of the media, the left, and far too many on the right, shows, useful idiots are in no short supply.