Julian Assange, Egomaniac

With the release of hundreds of thousands of American diplomatic documents coming on top of an earlier release of hundreds of thousands of American military documents, an oddball web site called Wikileaks has become the new front line of the endless fight between free speech and national security. Most discussion has focused on responses — legal, political, and even covert military — that might seek to hold Wikileaks accountable for the consequences of their actions.

But the particular selection of diplomatic documents for exposure raises additional questions as well. Usually, those who are opposed to American military action treat diplomacy as the sacrosanct alternative. The earlier release of military documents was easy to view as a conventional anti-war statement taken to a huge scope. But in his statement that the diplomatic releases are targeted at a “lying, corrupt, and murderous leadership”, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange may be exposing a far more sweeping agenda: Full-scale anti-Americanism and its cousin, anti-capitalism.

Assange flatly doesn’t seem to care if people die as a result of his massive releases of stolen American military and diplomatic documents. In fact, he seems pleased by the prospect insofar as it gives him another charge with which to bash the American government. And after all, the people who will die — people who either are Americans or who committed the crime of helping the Americans — pretty much deserve it, right? Assange has refused to address the question of what gives him the right to condemn hundreds or thousands of people to death. As one CIA analyst put it bluntly, “those people will disappear.” Assange can’t be bothered to care. He has bigger fish to fry.

Assange’s has announced that his next target is a major bank (an American one, of course). At least there it is less likely that people will die as a result of Assange’s egomaniacal crusade. But it also exposes Assange’s broader agenda. He isn’t only opposed to the United States because of its foreign policies, you see. He is opposed to the entire global capitalist system, which he sees as inseparable from American global power. Like violent anti-American anarchists who came before him, Assange just wants to crash that system and he doesn’t have much time to discuss what the alternatives look like.

What a long way we have come from the days of a political crank of Assange’s type hanging around a college campus waving an anti-American sign and maybe leading a seminar or two. Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky are sooo 1970s next to this guy, right? Armed with a few computer servers and a cartoonish set of ideas where the United States is the “Legion of Doom” and the brave rebels (led by none other than Julian Assange, of course) bravely fight bravely the brave fight against the Death Star United States, Assange plays to a global mob of anti-Americans for whom no consequence is relevant except that the Americans get what’s coming to them. It’s not policy critique. It’s just bigotry.