Julian Assange: Bit Player In His Own Story

The young, idealistic Julian
Assange we all remember

Watching the storm surrounding WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange’s arrest yesterday, I’ve deduced one clear conclusion: something happened. Beyond that, it’s tough to say. Did free journalism and democratic ideals get dragged kicking and screaming from international asylum? Did a rampant tool get evicted from Ecuador? Depends on who’s asking. Because Assange himself has become a total cypher; his arrest says more about us than him.

I don’t know about anybody else, but WikiLeaks creased my awareness in 2010, when it released reams of documents and hours of footage related to atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. He quickly became a nuisance for powerful people; when he ruffled the Obama Administration’s feathers for exposing their ongoing drone assassination campaign. Politicians love talking about transparency; WikiLeaks revealed they’re less friendly toward the practice.

But despite what some critics claimed after yesterday’s arrest, what Assange and WikiLeaks did wasn’t journalism. WikiLeaks simply deluged audiences with raw, undigested information, mostly in terms general audiences couldn’t understand. We still needed experienced journalists to translate piles and piles of documents, written in specialized jargon and flooded with sloppy data, into language us numpties actually speak. If we’re honest, journalists have done a bad job of this.

This became visible during the 2016 campaign. WikiLeaks became a pipeline of information directed from Moscow, through their website, into American news outlets, which kept the “Hilary’s e-mails” story alive despite a paucity of actual information. Though probably unconnected with the GOP campaign, it became clear WikiLeaks was carrying water for one side when Donald Trump praised the company nearly 150 times at campaign events.

This puts people evaluating the Assange arrest in difficult straits. On one hand, the Pentagon Papers precedent says, provided leaked information doesn’t jeopardize national security or put lives in danger, it’s always better for citizens to know. The democratic process requires informed, literate citizens in full command of the facts, because only debate under such conditions has the ability to flush bad ideas from the body politic.

On the other hand, WikiLeaks didn’t release information neutrally, or in service to democracy generally. It’s tough to say whether they knowingly sat on information regarding corruption at the heart of the Trump campaign, including ties between Russia and Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and others. Maybe they just didn’t have such data. However, they clearly flooded the information market with information damaging to Democrats, imported wholesale from Russia.

And don’t try telling me Assange didn’t run WikiLeaks during his seven years of Ecuadorian asylum. During that time, the embassy needed to rescind first his phone privileges, then his internet access, because he repeatedly violated their stipulation that he not engage in political maneuvers. Standards of international law require asylum seekers to not engage with outside or homeland politics— a standard Assange and Edward Snowden both disregard flagrantly.

The shambling, zombie-like Julian
Assange we saw getting arrested

Watching the mass-media interpretation of Assange’s arrest, and the professional journalists chin-wagging over exactly what it means, it’s clear everyone imbues Assange with their values. He’s a horrible harbinger of dictatorial influence on global electoral politics. Or he’s a martyr to high-handed authoritarian government, getting railroaded by a conspiracy between the Republicans and the Tories. The language reporters have used since the arrest has been downright Manichean.

I’d contend, though, that it’s possible to say Assange represented the best aspirations for the “marketplace of ideas,” while also conceding that his company had become a clearinghouse for the worst realities of partisan hackery. Despite the moral dualism of mythology, nobody is entirely good, nor entirely bad. Humans, including journalists, are sloppy amalgams of ideal and expediency. As the Apostle Paul said, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.”

Furthermore, I’d contend that the hunched-over, unshaven hobo we saw getting evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy yesterday wasn’t the would-be Free Speech Champion who went inside seven years ago. Isolated, lonely, and increasingly desperate, Assange appears to have undergone the same transformation that plagues rock stars and cult leaders. The pure-eyed Assange of 2012 isn’t the broken, captured fugitive of 2019. We all change; some of us decline.

Watching talking heads argue about Assange, I’d assert we aren’t seeing anybody talk about the real human. They’re discussing the ideals he represents to each individual. Assange himself doesn’t matter, probably hasn’t mattered for years. If we look past the figurehead he’s become, and examine the ideals we look for in journalists and other professional truth-tellers, perhaps we can escape the gravitational pull of the current controversy, and fix our long-term problems.