A Martyrdom Cult and a Self Harming Attention Seeker.

We have recently had another round of the ‘Assange in court’ show. The British courts have found another reason to put off extraditing Assange to the United States.

It is clear he is never going to the States. Uncle Sam is not really interested in having him. The British and American secret services have him right where they want him.

It is as I parodied in my short story about sacrificial victims. Assange is the perfect martyr. He is a dope with a need for attention, and a warped understanding of right. He seemed to believe at the start that he was going to force the establishment to mend its ways, so we could all go back to some ideal time in the past when there was a democracy.

He has a certain charisma about him. He has attracted a large following who have become obsessed about him, building him up into something he definitely is not. They are also people who imagine there was some ideal time in the past when there was political freedom.

The best illustration of the delusional nature of the cult built up around Assange is the statement some of these people recently made, that “freeing Assange would free the world.” Nothing at all would change if Assange were freed tomorrow. The whole Anglosphere would still be living under capitalist hegemony, as it has for centuries.

All the journalists in the world, all the ‘whistleblowing’, will change nothing. This delusion only leads plenty of people to get themselves into trouble for nothing. A revolution removing the present order and establishing a better one is the only thing which will change this.

Assange serves several purposes for The Shadow. One is as an ongoing warning to anyone who exposes anything which really causes it inconvenience. For this purpose, it is much better to keep Assange in limbo, bringing him out every few months.

If they finally ordered the Kangaroo to send him off to some dungeon for 200 years, that would be the end of it. People would forget about him. Some would find a new martyr to obsess over.

Assange is a useful distraction. Huge time and resources are spent maintaining this cult, which could be directed to more useful things. Of course, the corps of lawyers around Assange are making money from the donations that keep coming in.

I do get an impression that the cult is getting a little tired of Assange. Donations seem to be falling off. The Shadow may be getting tired of it too.

Probably the biggest thing which keeps Assange in jail now is the huge civil award he could get if he were released. That alone will probably keep him in jail until he dies.

Defense lawyers in political cases usually are scum. The ethical course for a lawyer, if confronted with a rigged proceeding, where the judges are not even going to make a pretense of following rules, where there is no chance of justice, is to call it out, and walk out. There is nothing he or she can do there except help create an illusion of a legitimate proceeding.

If Assange’s lawyers just walked out, the Kangaroos would be in a dilemma. They do not really want to send Assange to the States. They may choose to end the show by arranging for him to have a stroke.

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As long as Assange lives, he will have some following who will never tire of him. I am really sick of hearing about him. But since the world is going to keep telling me all about him, I am going to keep telling the world my view of him.

If there is one useful thing about Assange, it is that he is a good start point to talk about what is wrong with various liberal ideas. At core is the idea that we live in a democracy, or there has ever been a democracy in the west in modern times, or the present institutions are a model for a democracy. We live under a capitalist oligarchy.

I am not here going into all these ideas. Assange has imagined that he is a journalist. He is also styled as a whistleblower and as a champion of free speech. Journalists are usually not useful people and the two concepts above are specious.

I have this brief advice for anyone considering “blowing the whistle”. Ask the following questions:

Does the party you are spilling the beans to have the power to correct the malfeasance? No?

Does it have the power to protect you from retaliation? No?

Then do not do it.

We do not live in freedom. Achieving it will require the overthrow of the hegemonic power. That is a huge topic in itself. “Exposing” any misdeeds of the hegemony will do nothing toward overthrowing it.

Mostly, they do not care if they are exposed. Trying to expose them merely exposes you as a problem, to be managed or eliminated. Or, something to make a spectacle and distraction out of.

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It is actually pretty hard to get factual information about Assange. This is usual when the person is the subject of hagiographers on one hand, and demonizers on the other. Assange also seems to make a great effort to obscure the facts about himself and what his real beliefs are, and to create a false image of himself.

It is generally accepted that Assange is on the light end of the autism spectrum, the Asperger’s end. He is said to be very arrogant, moving furniture around and taking things off tables. He has infuriated many of his would be collaborators. Asperger’s is common in tech nerds, but also in political activists.

In his teen years, Assange made himself “Mendax the Hacker”. After the police caught up with him he got off lightly because he did no real damage to powerful interests, and because of his unstable childhood. He was the subject of a documentary about this.


A few things about him stand out from the sludge of contradictory misinformation. It is well established that his real views tend toward right wing libertarianism. Thus it is strange that he is so fervently supported by so many hard left and green left people.


Some of the paranoid right wing blogs have claimed that the circumstances of Wikileak’s founding show it is itself a creation of some sort of deep state intelligence branch. That is definitely an exaggeration.


However Wikileaks, in its early years, clearly had some establishment support. Yet its actual history is obscure and confusing. I am sure I will never sort it out.


Assange is held out as its sole founder, which does not seem to be the case. It seems to have been originally conceived as a collective. It seems several of its cofounders left it in its early years, complaining about Assange’s ego problems.


Assange has done a series of very stupid things to land himself in the situation he is now in. He at times talked about Wikileaks being the ‘intelligence service for the public’. It should not be surprising that various intelligence organizations saw him and Wikileaks as hostile entities and acted accordingly.


If you are going to try to operate as an ‘intelligence service for the public’, you do not go jet setting all over the world. You stay where you are safe and send out lower level operatives. You maintain operational security.


Whatever use he was to the fight against whatever exactly he has been fighting against, ended when he was arrested in 2010. At that point he should have gone silent and not allowed his associates to waste resources trying to free him. Instead he kept trying to run Wikileaks from his laptop while under house arrest and later while holed up in an embassy.


This means he was compromising the operations of Wikileaks and the safety of people who were providing information. He was also compromising his own legal case. He also complicated things for those working to protect him, and offended the government granting him asylum.


The second most foolish thing Assange has done has been to go to the Ecuadorean embassy. The point of seeking asylum is that the entity from which it is being sought must be capable of actually providing it. A small power with no clout with the British government and only a leased office space as an embassy, is not qualified to provide asylum.


The obvious place to have gone to was the Russian embassy. He had been working with the Russian state broadcaster RT. Even states such as Brazil, Argentina, or Venezuela, then under anti-imperialist governments, would likely have been able and willing to help.


It is unlikely the British police would have thrown a cordon around the Russian embassy building. Nor would they have intercepted a tint-windowed car going from that building to a special plane parked at an airport. They may even have thought twice about pulling such stunts at the Venezuelan embassy. But Ecuador?


While Assange was in that embassy, he kept trying to publish things which complicated Ecuador’s relations with its neighbours: still trying to act like he was above everything. The Ecuadorean government had to restrict his internet activity over his loud and indignant protests.


But the most foolish thing he has done has been to spurn the offer of the Russian secret services to get him out of the embassy to safety. The Russians put a lot of planning into this operation and were said to be quite disturbed when he angrily rejected it. That will almost certainly have been his last way out of the trap he is in.


These points of information about his career show a strange and dysfunctional personality with a need to be adored, but also a serious masochism and death wish. His Asperger’s diagnosis is already discussed. He seems to want to die in jail. Therefore, no one should waste any more time on him. Let him die.

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If you want a little more on my views of self harming attention seekers, consult my post of April 4th about people burning themselves to death.