I've stressed Julian Assange's extreme hostility to the United States over and over again. But because WikiLeaks is so romanticized --- Time's readers wanted him as Person of the Year --- that the point gets lost sometimes.
But Jonathan Foreman places the WikiLeaks founder's anti-Americanism front-and-center in an analysis of what motivates the former computer hacker. And this essay is one of the best I've seen, "The WikiLeaks War on America":
Assange is so much an auto-didact and self-creation that one hesitates to place him in any particular political school. However, his conviction that the United States, especially its military, is a priori evil is very much in accord with a current on the Australian left associated with John Pilger, a celebrated journalist and filmmaker, and the late Wilfred Burchett, a star journalist and likely KGB agent who championed the cause of North Korea. For Pilger, who writes a column for the New Statesman and produces documentaries that make Michael Moore look like Glenn Beck, all American interventions are imperialistic and carried out at the behest of sinister corporations and plutocrats, and even Communist crimes like those of the Khmer Rouge are really the fault of the United States. This brand of virulent anti-Americanism, common in Australian academic circles, seems to have curdled during the Vietnam War (in which Australian troops fought). But when probing Assange’s writings for his politics, it is also worth noting that Australian leftism has long had a strong anarchist current, awash in nostalgic sympathy for the rebels and bandits who had been transported to the continent when it was a prison colony of the British Empire.
Assange seems to suffer from a more extreme version of a phenomenon common in anti-war circles in Britain and America: the absolute unquestioned certainty that American forces have been and are continuing to be guilty of terrible crimes because of their very nature. It is a form of knowledge that requires no evidence or certainly no confirmation by a court of law. And in Assange’s case, it apparently means that the Americans are now and always have been the bad guys.
Certainly, when Assange told Der Spiegel in the course of an interview about the War Logs that “I enjoy crushing bastards,” the bastards to whom he referred were not the Taliban, which kills women for learning to read; the Sunni insurgents who blow up packed Iraqi marketplaces and mosques; or the Shia militants who do Iran’s murderous dirty work in Iraq and Lebanon.
Assange was also revealing more than mere cold-bloodedness in his responses to criticism for revealing in the War Logs the names of Afghans cited as informants or employees of U.S. troops. First he said that if something happened to them as a result, it was certainly unfortunate, but it was collateral damage from his campaign for truth. But he also told the Times of London that Afghan informers for the coalition had behaved “in a criminal way.” They were, in other words, on the wrong side, mere collaborators who had put themselves in danger of reprisal. It would seem that, in Assange’s worldview, the Taliban is the legitimate government of Afghanistan, resisting imperialist invaders.
Until his arrest in December in London on the rape charges that had so concerned his Wiki-Leaks colleagues, Assanche himself was lving a cloak-and-dagger, semi-fugitive existence, sleeping on floors and communicating only through disposable mobile phones or online. It may therefore be no surprise that WikiLeaks itself functions like a private version of the intelligence organizations he hates and fears. And while he may see himself as a kind of cyber Robin Hood, and enjoyed being called a “James Bond of journalism” in Sweden, he more closely resembles one of those James Bond villains who runs a secret international criminal organization and has the desire if not the power to destroy a sovereign state he considers his enemy.
It is telling that, for all the talk of Assange’s courage in taking on the American goliath, the truth is that his assault on the U.S. government has not put him at great risk. Assange has long liked to talk in what seems like a self-dramatizing way about his persecution by the authorities, complaining of “covert following and hidden photography” by police and intelligence agencies. The truth is that both the Bush and Obama administrations have proved remarkably feckless and feeble in their response to the War Logs and, worse, in the latter’s failure to prevent the publication of the State Department cables it knew was coming. Indeed, the very fact that, despite the revelations before the April 2010 video, Assange remained alive and at liberty to continue and do even greater damage gives the lie to his paranoid fears of ruthless, hyper-powerful Western states capable of wiping out all truth and justice unless their actions are exposed by people like him.
It would be interesting to see if Assange ever dares to take on the Russian FSB, the Chinese government, or even the French security services—all of which would have far fewer scruples about lethally punishing him than the American state he believes is so dangerous.
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