Assange’s Chinese Finger Trap

Assange has been embroiled in a sex scandal that many of his supporters claim is more about his position at WikiLeaks than it is about allegations brought by two Swedish women. The womens’ right to see Assange brought to trial is often dismissed cleverly by Assange with rhetoric that belies many complications that are far too boring for the general public to delve into. So, skipping past all this bullshit designed as an ‘out’ so we don’t infringe on the notion of justice for rape victims, let’s explore the possibility that Assange is in fact being set up with sex allegations to discredit him and his organization.

What is WikiLeaks? WikiLeaks is not transparent, so we don’t know exactly how they operate. If we are to take them at their word and ignore all evidence suggesting otherwise, as serves our technofetishist bias, they’re a cypherpunk dream come to life. Here is a service that provides would-be leakers with a safe crypto solution to ensure their anonymity. Never mind that there’s a complicated world outside the Internet where leakers get caught even when taking all prudent technological safeguards. WikiLeaks has provided a wealth of investigative scoops, and that’s good, right? Plus, Assange redacted them like any good professional journalist would.

But here’s what Bruce Sterling had to say back in December of 2010:

Now, in strict point of fact, Assange didn’t blandly pirate the massive hoard of cables from the US State Department. Instead, he was busily “redacting” and minutely obeying the proprieties of his political cover in the major surviving paper dailies. Kind of a nifty feat of social-engineering there; but he’s like a poacher who machine-gunned a herd of wise old elephants and then went to the temple to assume the robes of a kosher butcher. That is a world-class hoax.

Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting; not all of ‘em, but, well, it doesn’t take all of them.

Oh, never mind all that. It’s written by a crazed maniac enemy of Assange who is just a cheerleader for the US Government and not a world-renowned award winning science fiction writer and expert on hacker culture.

Why would the governments of Sweden and the US collaborate to smear Assange? The answer is very simple. Assange is a threat, and dealing with him in any other way would reflect poorly on politicians who actually do have something to lose. It is a heresy of the highest order to suggest that Sweden doesn’t actually want Assange extradited to the US, but this is one point we don’t need a ton of expert legal opinions to prove. It’d be much better to make everyone think Assange is a rapist, give him a small fine, and let WikiLeaks the Rapist Hacker Group go on their way as a totally discredited source for stuff no one believes.

Assange is in a Chinese Finger Trap. By fleeing to Ecuador and taking his legal struggle for freedom of speech to the global arena, he’s trapped himself in the embassy of a country with a very poor record for freedom of press and human rights. Now all the dumb sheeple out there think he’s a rapist on the run, and many of his former supporters now think he was never interested in free press to begin with. As unthinkable as those two possibilities are to us who still believe in Assange, it’s clear that by struggling out of the trap set by the evil Swedish and US conspiracy he’s only brought it tighter around him.

Paul Ronge, a former public relations adviser for Assange, recommended Assange face prosecution by Swedish authorities. Doing so would have saved Assange supporters this endless abject speculation and verbal gymnastics that attempt to thread the needle between defending Assange and respecting the claims of his rape victims. The words of Henry David Thoreau in the landmark work Civil Disobedience ring especially true: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” So even accepting Assange’s conviction that extradition to Sweden would mean rendition to the US and possible execution, he’d be better off as a dead man than as a disingenuous coward hiding in the embassy of a country that represents everything he opposes.

There’s only one way out of a Chinese Finger Trap.