Assange isn’t a dreamer, he’s a destroyer
Iremember when Julian Assange was the coolest thing on the planet. Back in 2010, on his first visit to London after his Wikileaks organisation revealed secrets of the US war on terror, I debated with him. The large lecture hall at City University was packed, and there was an almost erotic feeling in the air. You know the scene in the Indiana Jones movie when a student bats her eyelids at Harrison Ford and they’ve got ‘‘Love You’’ written on them? It was like that.
The people who practically threw their knickers and boxer shorts at him that night must have been perplexed to learn this week that his organisation enjoyed close contacts with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Seven years ago, at the height of Wikileaks’ fame - or infamy - the left claimed Assange as one of their own. The Chomskys, the Michael Moores and the Ken Loaches all championed the charismatic Australian. You could see their point even if you didn’t share their disdain for the America of Barack Obama. Assange and Wikileaks were helping to build a world of transparency and free information, in which government and corporations would be held to account and democracy could flourish. I quite liked the idea of it myself.
But the revelation this week that Wikileaks had suggested Assange become Australian ambassador to the United States was a sort of ludicrous appendix to a story that had already ended tragically. We had long known about the role Wikileaks played in releasing emails stolen from the Clinton campaign by Russian hackers.
But what did that make Assange politically? If he was a man of the left, why was he helping a man of the ever-so-right? Or, to put it another way, why does Assange care so much about Catalan independence? In the runup to and aftermath of the disputed independence referendum, Assange became one of the principal online advocates of separation from Spain. His tweets and posts were widely viewed in Catalonia - perhaps more than any other individual’s. Spain was a ‘‘banana monarchy’’ and an ‘‘occupying power’’ for whom ‘‘no trick is too dirty, no lie is too bold and no escalation is too much for a deep state to save itself. Watch.’’
Also keen on Catalan independence was the Russian troll, bot and disinformation industry. In the last two weeks of September, the Sputnik news agency put out more than 200 stories on Catalonia, and these stories paid more attention to what Julian Assange was saying than they did to Catalan leaders.
In that period the hashtag ‘‘Catalan’’ became one of the highest trending among Twitter accounts sourced back to Russian operations. Many of them were pushing the Assange tweets.
Trump? Catalonia? Russia? What does Julian Assange actually want? Hillary Clinton, who is of course his sworn enemy, recently described Assange as a ‘‘kind of nihilistic opportunist’’, who has been colonised by the far cleverer and far less public organs of the Russian state.
A nihilist, in case you’ve forgotten ‘‘rejects all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless’’. But meant in the way Mrs Clinton was using it, it’s someone for whom the destruction of existing beliefs and institutions is more important than the question of what replaces them.
In other words, it isn’t Catalonia that Assange cares about, but dismantling Spain. It isn’t modern US Republicanism he wishes to see succeed, but the forces of entropy. Within himself, I conjecture, he is only made whole by bringing down others. Like the home-wrecker, driven on by the sight of others living happily in families and marriages, his entire desire is to disrupt. What he can’t have himself - peace - he can deny to others.
Psychobabble, I know. But when, as happened in March, Nigel Farage pitched up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to support Assange, a strange quadrilateral of mutual support (possibly no more than rhetorical) emerged. Assange, Farage, Trump and Putin, loosely joined together, I would argue, in a commitment to disrupt the West.
As with freedom fighters and terrorists, one man’s disruptor is another man’s innovator. To build you have to destroy, and all that. In the past few years many of us have felt the desire to just pull the whole impossible thing down and start again. One Brexit motive that I understand is the ‘‘it’ll give us the shock we need to change things’’ argument.
Michael Gove did not have a portrait of Lenin in his ministerial office because he wanted All Power to the Surrey Soviets, but because Lenin represents tearing the place up and putting something else there instead. The man who was for a while Donald Trump’s brain, Steve Bannon, described himself in 2013 as a Leninist. ‘‘Lenin,’’ he told a historian of communism, ‘‘wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all today’s establishment.’’
Gove, though he has a destructive side, is also a builder. Bannon was not. Nor I think is Farage or his acolyte and funder, the multimillionaire Arron Banks. When the latter produced his account of the battle to leave the EU, he titled it The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign. I now realise the important part of the title was the Bad Boys not the Brexit. At the beginning of his book, Banks boasts that he was ‘‘expelled from school for pinching the lead off the roof and flogging it’’. Me, I’d be ashamed of that.
Every child knows, halfway through building an elaborate sandcastle or putting the last touches to a Lego spaceship, that they have to keep an eye open for the boy (it’s always a boy) who wants more than anything else to kick it down.
To transfer their internal disruption to you. Now you can knock down sandcastles on a global scale, thanks largely to the internet.
The innovative parts of the cyberworld are to me still magical. I am of the generation that started journalism in the slow, inefficient era of the cuttings library, and today the Google algorithm is my gold.
But as the Times’s revelations about Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum shows, the development of social media and even of search engines happened far more quickly than our capacity to understand how they might be abused. Into that gap have come the gamers, the troll factories, the nihilists and the disruptors. The cool kids, like Assange, who don’t want you to be happy.