I declare myself a fan of Julian Assange. Not because he has published the—up until now—842 diplomatic cables on Wikileaks, which is currently hosted here; who knows where it will be later? But because he demonstrates how inefficient: 1) the international justice system is; 2) the intelligence departments of supposedly the most advanced countries in the world; and 3) the attempts to censor the flow of information in an increasingly interconnected world.
I also consider myself critical of Julian Assange: 1) for not having published all 250,000 diplomatic cables at once, as he received them from Bradley Manning, so that everyone could read, investigate, and use the information democratically and transparently as they see fit; 2) for taking advantage of the situation and benefiting questionable media outlets like The Guardian; and 3) for not taking a similarly challenging stance against authoritarian and dictatorial regimes worldwide.
That said, I admit I am fascinated by the Wikileaks saga. Assange said recently that he is just “a guy with a laptop,” meaning an individual with a computer. The fact that one person, with a laptop, can cause such a global media uproar is indicative of the extraordinary era we live in. When I say “we,” I refer, of course, to the countries of the so-called Western liberal democracy. If Assange were in Venezuela, revealing state secrets of the Hugo Chavez regime and its communications with FARC, ETA, Iran, Cuba, Russia, China, etc., he would already be dead. There’s no doubt he wouldn’t be giving virtual interviews to every leftist media outlet that wants them.
Assange claims that his aim is to expose the supposed corruption of governments/organizations. Governments, as I mentioned earlier, run by liberal democracies, and profit-driven organizations like banks, which, in the not-so-novel view of the radical left, are responsible for every crisis that has plagued the world over the last two thousand years. Hypocrisy must be uncovered. Isn’t it just as hypocritical to argue that all the world’s ills can be attributed to a few governments, which, let’s be honest, not only permit the existence of individuals like Assange but also are responsible for the creation, maintenance, propagation, and dissemination of technological information systems like the Internet? What would happen to Assange in places where the state blocks access to the internet, like Cuba, Iran, or China? How would those regimes treat a Bradley Manning-type individual? Assange claims to advocate for transparency. So why doesn’t he abandon his hiding spots and appear in court to defend himself, as the law requires? If you have nothing to hide, why be afraid, right?
So far, nothing published in those cables is new, except in the minds of fanatical payroll supporters of dictatorial regimes. Those of us pursuing objectivity as the ultimate goal would like to see the Assange effect multiplied across the world’s dictatorships. We would like to see governments ruled by liberal democracies adopt similar censorship policies towards servers—located in Switzerland—that host publications from terrorist organizations like FARC. We would love to see a joint effort, like the one recently deployed against Assange, that pursued the capture of terrorists protected by rogue states, like those in Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Libya, etc.
A bit of objectivity when identifying who the true enemies of liberal democracies in the Western world are wouldn’t hurt at all.