Julian Assange: a summary for dimwits

1. Julian Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning in relation to allegations of sexual assault. He has not been charged. He has not been 'incarcerated' for aeons as Wikileaks keeps saying - most sex crime suspects are banged up on remand, not bailed to a massive mansion in the countryside before diving into the Ecuadorian Embassy.

2. Julian Assange is innocent unless charged and proven guilty. There's nothing progressive about celebrating a man's refusal to assist an inquiry by the police force of a country which is much, much more equitable and liberal than the UK.

3. The UK and US are definitely infuriated by Wikileaks' activities, and no doubt the US would love to spirit him away from Sweden to somewhere like Texas. This doesn't mean he should seek sanctuary in Ecuador - a largely admirable country though ironically lacking a free press - but that he should face the music in Sweden and our progressive comrades in that country should help resist any US extradition proceedings should that come to pass. I don't see anything wrong with asking the Swedes to guarantee Assange won't be extradited to the US. While we're on the subject, I'm rather confused by the British government's hostility to Assange - after all, when General Pinochet came to stay, hands dripping with the blood of thousands, it protected him from extradition to Spain, in one of the most shameful episodes of political history.

4. Confusing Assange with Wikileaks, and assuming that his sexual conduct must automatically be as stainless as his position on big power duplicity, is a distortion of progressive politics which leads to the dead-end of conspiracy theories.

5. The new element - Ecuador's diplomatic rights - is genuinely worrying. If the UK decides that it can violate international law by entering an Embassy in pursuit of Assange, then there are no more rules in this arena: why should the Chinese not retrieve dissidents sheltering in Western embassies, or the authorities of any other repressive country? It doesn't matter whether it's Assange or the most sainted individual: this aspect of the case is really worrying.

6. The whole affair has unmasked a lot of so-called leftists who think the alleged victims' rights are far less important than their hero's worries. If your politics depends on you downgrading sexual assault and vilifying women when it's politically convenient, you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Of course there's a long history of this kind of vicious masculinist Stalinism: Gerry Healy (Workers' Revolutionary Party, bankrolled by the Iraqi and Libyan reactionary regimes) was a serial rapist, violent thug and hypocrite, yet his cult's members rarely wavered from the argument that all criticism was CIA or KGB-inspired propaganda. Healy and his friend Ken Livingstone claimed it was all MI5-inspired. Sound familiar?

7. Socialists don't need heroes. We understand that individuals are flawed, weak and often contradictory. Instead, we believe in the Cloud: the collective wisdom of the intelligent human race. We know that ideas survive individual and generational failure, defeat and death. We believe that a massive never-ending argument, while not always efficient, will guide us towards humane, workable relations between us all. Hero-worship is a dead end, the fantasy of those determined to bring about the apocalypse/class-war/race war or whatever regardless of prevailing conditions.

8. Automatically adopting positions because you don't like those on the 'other' side is what Lenin called 'infantile leftism' (though it applies to the right as well). 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' is a vicious, destructive mantra. What kept billions of people poor and oppressed during the Cold War? The West's deliberate support for any regime - Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, Iraq etc etc - which promised to be anti-Communist. The same goes for the Soviet Union's puppet states - Ethiopia, Angola and Romania. This kind of mindless, obedient politics is the exact opposite of true, humanist communism. It's weird having to point this stuff out because it seems so obvious, but clearly not, given the continued tolerance of Kissinger, George Galloway and most of the Tory Party.

Assange is a diversion. Wikileaks is a noble enterprise, but he is - like us - weak and complicated. By all means resist American/UK efforts to demonise him, but understand that canonising him is simply the mirror of demonisation, and doing so plays their game.

Songs for Julian

Assange and his friends are so self-righteous that I'm driven to make fun of him. So here are a few Swedish songs for him:

Abba, 'Why Did It Have To Be Me?':



Abba, 'Under Attack':



Abba, 'So Long':



Abba, 'The King Has Lost His Crown':



Abba, 'Free As A Bumble Bee':



Abba, 'Disillusion:



There are plenty of other Abba tracks which sound appropriate. But I'll finish with a Blur song, 'Pressure on Julian':

Adieu, Assange

So, 5 judges have decided that Julian Assange can be deported to Sweden to be questioned (not charged) on suspicion of sexual assault. Two judges disagreed, and apparently Assange's lawyers are appealing on the grounds that the decision was made on the basis of arguments not aired in court.

From the Wikileaks press releases, tweets and followers, you'd think that Assange was being sent to a CIA black site for immediate torture and execution, rather than to one of the world's most civilised states for questioning. This is utterly disappointing: I've long been a supporter of Wikileaks' mission, but the organisation has become an unreflective propaganda machine for one particular individual: this morning they're tweeting the two judges' dissent without mentioning the majority judgement, and they spend a good deal of their time organising 'rallies for Assange', with no acknowledgement that the complainants' stories deserve investigation.

Things like this don't help:

Assange: 613 days Grand Jury, 533 days bank blockade, 530 days house arrest. Charges? None. 

Assange isn't Mandela or Dreyfus and Sweden isn't North Korea. He's been living in a massive mansion with all mod cons, whereas most people accused of sexual assaults get a shared cell in a rundown prison. I have no doubt that the US and its allies are all over Assange's life and records, but presenting him as a martyr to CIA-supported feminists is not progressive. A dignified stance would be to profess innocence and faith in the Swedish legal system, and have your day in court. Wikileaks should stick to its core purpose and resist becoming a vehicle for one man's messianic tendencies. I hope he's innocent - but turning every event into a grand conspiracy reduces the chances of Wikileaks being taken seriously when it uncovers (as it frequently does) real conspiracies.

Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange face off: in prison!

See it here in this ever-so-slightly satirical cartoon about the American plan to charge publishers of leaked material with espionage.

Meanwhile, have another of my favourite words: synfyfyriol. It sounds utterly beautiful, doesn't it? Especially if you know that in Welsh, 'f' is a v sound and the y is a slightly flattened vowel. It means 'absent-minded', 'pondering', 'musing' and so on. There's even a song about it, by the wonderful Fflaps (hello Alan) and available on the sublime Triskedekaphilia album (play it here).

Assange bailed

Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks, has been freed on bail pending extradition proceedings on a Swedish charge of sexual assault, though the Swedes are lodging an immediate appeal, which seems pointless. Assange is probably the most recognisable person in Europe at the moment.

Some important points which seem to have gone unmentioned recently:
1. Innocent until proven guilty.
2. Sexual violence is a serious crime.
3. Sweden is a mature and independent democracy with a good reputation for an independent judiciary. Perhaps there is murky behaviour afoot, but let's not rush to judgement.
4. Julian Assange is not Wikileaks.
5. It is possible to be morally flawed in some regards and righteous in others. People are complicated.
6. If he's guilty of sexual assault, that doesn't mean his actions in regard to Wikileaks are somehow tainted. Likewise, if you're opposed to Wikileaks, Assange's other behaviour shouldn't alter your perspective.
7. I still haven't heard Hillary Clinton explain why publishers of leaked material are guilty of espionage, nor why the CIA wanted the DNA of United Nations officials. The rest we can argue about, but this is pretty clearly non-diplomatic behaviour.

Oh the irony

The US is hosting next year's World Press Freedom Day! Meanwhile, the US wants Assange on espionage charges: despite the fact that he didn't leak the Wikileaks files, Bradley Manning probably did.


If Assange is a spy, then so is every newspaper editor who's every published leaked information, and every blogger who's repeated it. Assange may have committed a sexual assault, and if so, he deserves to face justice (though last night's Newsnight seemed to have decided that he is a rapist, rather than innocent until proved guilty), but he isn't a spy.


Update:
And so it comes to pass: weirdo egotist Senator Joe Lieberman has now called for the New York Times to be investigated for espionage (even though that craven publication sought Administration permission to publish). At this point, I'll draw on Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the United States:

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.