Mr Assange & His Sycophants  

I’ve never seen him as anything but a likely scoundrel. I shared a piece at OPEN SALON (below) saying so when the Far Left here and in Europe began its usual fawning over people they only ‘know’ on the surface. A problem the Far Left has and has had since the mid-1960s, is that whenever a previously little-known person tells the West loudly and, even more so, with tech-savvy, that it can go to hell, no matter the specific content of the message and without regard to whatever else the person may be, the Far Left celebrates that person and too often places itself in the morally and untenable position of defending the increasingly indefensible. That’s what my head tells me. My gut tells me that if Mr Assange is shown not, in fact, to be guilty of the sex crimes with which he’s been charged in Sweden, I’ll be genuinely surprised.—

 

Why I’m Skeptical of Mr. Assange and his Followers 

Published at Open Salon, 9 December, 2010 The Wiki-Tekkies make me feel so old and left behind.     I marched.     I wrote and petitioned.      But Oh how we have grown. Oh how we have advanced. I am left in CyberDust.     Campus tech-savvies of the ‘sixties, some of whom called themselves leftists, some wanting to be known as liberals or even progressives (the term was used), some more pleased with radical, really got off striking blows to The System. Some went so far as to find a pal who could whistle in perfect-pitch and rip off Ma Bell!     Think about it!     How juicily subversive!    

 

They could stand in cold, obscure, cinder-block corners of their and their co-consprators’ college dorms, pick up the pay-phone receiver, and with maybe ten or more others whose parents footed the bills for this foolery, made calls, from Philly to ‘Frisco, from New York to New London, from L.A. to El Salvador, and really get off!    That bastard phone company, those faceless university deans who grudgingly gave you only a partial aid package  and made you work for it, The System–you and your buds really stuck it to ’em!

And if you got a C on the paper you had to finish that night instead of your more usual B- because you spent most of the night phonily phoning faux-friends and firms in the Philippines, that’s just the price of ‘real’ patriotism.      All this Strike-A-Blow tinkering turned out to be decidedly un-fun, and the ‘worth-it calculus’ required re-calibration when three members of the the SDS-offshoot, The Weather Underground, blew themselves to bits in a Greenwich Village townhouse, on 6 March 1970.     

The legions of men and women now targetting Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Amazon, the Swedish prosecutor’s office and other sites in what seem to be an escalating series of cyber assaults have put me in mind of my–well not precisely my–youth.  And the Facebook and Twitter leadership are now roiling because they face the real possibility of serious legal action for openly hosting communications among some of those planning these attacks. The sites, of course, and those using them, will argue free speech; prosecutors may well see these sites as hosting conspiracies to break numbers of laws.  

Legal teams on both sides are pulling for-profit all-nighters.  

I am certain in my mind that there’s more to Julian Assange than a simple Champion of People’s Justice.      

Can anyone lay out here his full and complete background and his history of good works prior to his Wiki-Leaks?

In all of what’s been written–and I read a good deal–I cannot make out a consistent back-story that explains his  Now.

He almost appears to have emerged on the stage not very unlike the fairly obscure thirty-three-year-old Jesus, riding a white donkey into a viciously angry Jerusalem mob-scene thoroughly ripe for revolution, overturning the money-changers’ tables and inciting both the wrath of the Romans and the adoration of the masses. And then, he, quite clearly a good man without a clear past, is murdered. (There’s a reason Phil Och’s last anthem, Crucifixion, has been burning my brain ever since Mr. Assange has become who he has become. 

What I want to know of Mr. Assange — judgment still somewhat suspended is what Cary Grant demands of Eva Marie-Saint, in Hitch’sNorth By Northwest: How Does a Girl Like You Get to be a Girl Like You?  

I am willing to believe that there’s a complex set of desires and motivations in the puckish man that includes a desire to do Good, and I am also willing to think that the sex charges may be fraudulent. For some it’s obvious that the charges are trumped-up. They may well be. That will out. My gut says there’s something to it, at least enough for me to withhold adoration.  

What will also out is the efficacy, the social benefit, that allegedly accrues from making every diplomatic cable and conversation among nations and their representatives public.

Some think that, by definition, we live better when governments must always transact business in harsh sunlight only. For many this seems an obvious benefit of what Mr. Assange is trying to do. I am not so sure.     

I would ask you who were alive in October, 1962, if you really would’ve wanted a Julian Assange to throw open the exchanges among Mr. Kruschev, Mr. Castro, and the Kennedy brothers over Cuban missiles. I have no little doubt, myself, that had that occurred, the blinding light of truth would have been likely fast followed by the blinding light of nuclear detonation.

I think the great majority of those now conspiring to take down the symbols and the guts of governments, diplomacy, and business…those enthrall to Mr. Assange as a personality and those who are not…for them Wiki-Leaks/Mr. Assange is a train that finally, finally came on-time. These people, figuratively, have been waiting, itching, ever since they realized that their illegal long-distance 1960’s dorm calls didn’t bring down The System, or even Ma Bell. 

…& isn’t it fun how impossible it is to know, now, whether or not the man feels more Right, Left, or just Skilled, in some ways, and Bloody Nuts?

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