As some of my handful of readers know, I've never been convinced of the -- shall we say -- motives and independence of Julian Assange and his business enterprise, WikiLeaks. I have my own reasons for skepticism and disbelief which I have extensively detailed here and elsewhere. Scott Creighton, at his "American Everyman" blog has detailed his rationale for not accepting the "Product Assange" that's being sold to the public, in a number of posts over the last few months.
His latest on the topic takes the matter a few steps further and essentially indicts the "Liberal Class" (h/t Chris Hedges) for its uncritical acceptance of Julian and his business enterprise at face value.
It's well worth the time to read and consider, especially given the signs of outright madness Assange has been showing more and more of lately.
It's all about him, in other words, and it has always been all about him.
Those who fall for this crap strike me as seriously foolish, people who have really lost their way and can be manipulated to believe almost anything as long as it appears to be opposed to the prevalent power structure. With the emphasis on appears to be.
I recognized early on that Julian really isn't opposed to the prevalent power structure, not at all. He is quite comfortably aligned with it. The fact that the main outlets for his leaks have been Establishment media, and the sole American outlet has been the New York Times (even after his little spat with them over John Burns thing) which everyone knows -- or should know -- is a deeply involved Government propaganda organ, is an obvious tip off of what's really going on here.
Apparently the Left, what's left of it (!), and its Libertarian hangers-on is so desperate for a Hero to Lead Them Out of the Wilderness, that they will readily attach themselves to a mountebank like Assange and celebrate his "triumphs!" and ritualistically denounce anything that suggests things may not be what they seem with him and with WikiLeaks.
The desperation on the Left for a Hero is what's been so striking to me. Instead of doing the hard and necessary work to achieve the important values of social and economic Dignity and Justice, what passes for the Left in this country has come to rely more and more on a handful of Heroic Figures in politics and the media to do it for them. In other words, they seem to believe that Faith is sufficient.
This is sad. Faith matters, no doubt about it. But it is never sufficient unto itself, especially if that Faith is focused on individuals.
Much as I admire Chris Hedges, for example, and as much as he puts his own comfort and safety on the line to make his point, I don't elevate him to Heroic stature mostly because I see him as a scout, a pathfinder. He's looking for a way through the Wilderness, he has not declared he has found it or that he necessarily will find it. He is on a path of discovery. And along the way, he indicts the Liberal Class as thoroughly as anyone has, bless his heart. He knows what's gone wrong and he's trying to find a way to rectification.
Julian? Not so much. Because everything on the whole planet is about him, and he was the cause of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (and no doubt the Middle West as well), his efforts have never been about any sort of rectification of conditions, never about justice, never about dignity, they are only about his personal prominence, and particularly about fostering the triumph of the essentially Rightist political faction that knows how to do Imperialism correctly. He is opposed to the failures of the New Imperialism, not to Imperialism itself.
I could go on and I have gone on and I won't go on at length about this any more.
But I do recommend Creighton's piece on the matter of "Product Assange" for a corrective viewpoint.
[Oh, Happy St Patrick's Day! Faith and Begorrah!]
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