Leftists have this really weird tendency sometimes of accusing some of their best allies of being secret feds or cryptofascists. I understand where this paranoia comes from but it’s not healthy and it’s not helpful.
I disagree, I think it’s healthy as communists to be skeptical and do our due diligence and background checks before we start getting too confident in someone.
Assange is not a marxist and he’s not even on the left – there was a small part on his politics that I first wrote in but then edited out because there’s not much conclusive info there and it was over 10 years ago, but basically he praised Ron and Rand Paul in 2011 for being the good part of the Republicans, despite them also being anti-abortion. He’s also not a US citizen and can’t vote in the elections there but eh, when has that stopped anyone from having an opinion lol. Then in Australia the same year, the Wikileaks party put up their election lists in such a way that if you voted for them and they didn’t get any seats, your vote would then go the fascist Australia First party and then to a “men’s rights” group before it went to the Greens. I’m not sure what the relevance of the Greens was in the article I read, but even the WL party talked about them so I feel like it was very relevant at the time.
There is also a part I didn’t write into the article about how when he was a teen in the 70s his mom dated a cult leader for a few years who had some ties to MK Ultra edit: dated a cult member when Assange was very young, which was known to abduct children and provide them with false identities. The author then links that to MK Ultra experiments being similar, but that seems to be about it.
^ I didn’t include that part about the cult in the article because the source I have for it is difficult to parse and doesn’t make more links than I do, so I’m unable to really make a connection myself.
Assange/Wikileaks is only an ally insofar as some of the information they publish is interesting to anti-imperialists, but they’re not doing this out of ideological leanings that I can tell. They will – and primarily wanted to, in the beginning – post confidential documents on China, Iran, Russia, all the enemies of the US empire basically. It’s only in 2010 that they finally posted something on the US.
I disagree, I think it’s healthy as communists to be skeptical and do our due diligence and background checks before we start getting too confident in someone.
I dodge this by keeping with my younger anarchist tendancy of having no idols, no gods, no masters.
If I want to be inspired by someone I will look to someone I know in real life within my community. Media figures, celebs, they are all fake and manufactured. With people like Assange, western leftist ‘celebs’ (for lack of a better term) I just take what good they have to say and ignore the rest while assuming they have skeletons.
Typically if I know about them in the first place they have passed some media check that they arent a serious threat to power. (Zizek, Chomsky)
With Assange, the decades long campaign to have him put in solitary is enough for me to know the upper class are aware of the real threat he poses, hes still nothing id idolize but someone I will take the good from.
There is also a part I didn’t write into the article about how when he was a teen in the 70s his mom dated a cult leader for a few years who had some ties to MK Ultra edit: dated a cult member when Assange was very young,
How is that Assange’s fault?
It ties him and his mom to an MK Ultra cult, but the links are a bit tenuous at this time unless new information comes out.
I don’t see it. Definitely not Assange anyway, not that he’s a great person or anything, but he’d probably have said something by now. He spent a decade and a half in confinement, he would have said something. He had basically nothing to lose.
I think he started it for completely standard lib reasons, and then quickly discovered that there was may more shit to leak from what he previously saw as the Good Guys.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what made you say qualify your statement of him not being a great person?
I mean, there were some (possibly political and false) rape allegations in Sweden that were quickly dropped then brought up again… however
Editted
elaboration
The condom used for the rape, the main physical evidence, however, didn’t contain his DNA however
Third, as far as AA is concerned, even the Swedish prosecution never suggested that the conduct alleged by her could amount to “rape”. In a Twitter-message of 22 April 2013, AA herself publicly denied having been raped (jag har inte blivit våldtagen). AA also stated in a tabloid interview that Assange is not violent and that neither she nor SW felt afraid of him. While I agree with the prosecution that AA’s allegations, if proven to be true, could amount to sexual assault other than rape, the fact that she submitted as evidence a condom, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, which carried no DNA of either Assange or AA, seriously undermines her credibility.
While at the police station, SW even texted that she “did not want to put any charges on Julian Assange” but that “the police were keen on getting their hands on him” (14:26); and that she was “chocked (sic shocked) when they arrested him” because she “only wanted him to take a test” (17:06).
That, and he seems to be a libertarian, if you ctrl + f “libertarian” into wikipedia
In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that “WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical” and to expose injustice, not to be neutral.[34][556]
The rape allegations are already known to be not only false, but completely fabricated by the Swedish government, not even the ostensible “victims” (who didn’t consider it rape, didn’t attempt to charge Assange with rape, and had simply gone to police to try to get him to do another STD check)
It really shows how farcical it all was- and how much “Swedish neutrality” and all that was a sham, even long before it likely aided in bombing Nordstream, or it joined NATO. It’s literally the “I consent,” “I consent,” “I don’t” meme.
Well if this ain’t the most out of left field question I’ve seen today 👀
The motive doesn’t check out. America has no reason to pull off their own mask and shown the world their war crimes.
I’ll leave space for the possibility that one or more parts of the organization wasn’t privy to the true overarching mission and went in undesired directions. For example, there are many useful ignoramuses at USAID. Maybe Five Eyes had let WikiLeaks devolve into a hot, unmanaged mess.
They do and have done that. It’s known as a limited hangout but it’s become kind of the word of the day recently lol. It pays to play both sides so you can always come out on top somewhere, like betting half on red and half on black at roulette. Something gives but something else gains. And since the US government is both the casino and the player at the table, they win either way. Exposing their own crimes allows them to say “look we take accountability!” but the collateral murder video, for example, made a lot of noise but ultimately nothing happened about it other than Manning, the whistleblower (!), being jailed for a few years.
But nobody is saying America took accountability. Keeping the lid on would require no accountability to be taken.
Compare this to Israel for example which up until a year ago managed to rewrite history and shove all their war crimes under the table. They enjoyed a great reputation from it.
Exposing war crimeadoesn’t appear to do anything positive.
It’s the oldest trick in the book. It means that people look at what you want them to see rather than what you don’t want them to see.
Not to mention that disgruntled and/or naive employees will leak things that their employer doesn’t actually want leaked.
no
