We see what we want: How Assange became a political Rorschach test

“What an incredible sight. Julian Assange walking FREE outdoors!” tweeted Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene last Tuesday.

When Julian Assange first became a celebrity in 2010, we learned that he had spent his boyhood on Queensland’s Magnetic Island, so named because Captain Cook believed it had thrown his ship’s compass into disarray.

Julian Assange has become a Rorschach test, where people project onto him whatever they want to see.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Taylor Greene’s words, coupled with their subject’s raised fist at a Canberra airport, must to some have confirmed a world turned upside-down: this white-haired man’s release had somehow become the most watched since Nelson Mandela walked from the gates of Victor Verster Prison in 1990.

For proof of how weird it all was, you only had to look at the array of far-left and far-right figures uniting to hail Assange’s liberation, from antiwar group Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin and firebrand American scholar Cornel West to fallen Fox icon Tucker Carlson and MTG herself. As one US commentator put it, “it’s like finding out a bunch of different car brands are really the same company”.

But is it? Or is the strange pattern of support for Assange indicative of an even older consensus breaking down under its own weight?

When Assange began publishing classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and diplomatic cables from the Middle East which set out in black and white massive corruption by Western-backed dictatorships and secret military actions by the Pentagon, he was pitching to an audience who already sensed that the invasion of Iraq had been launched on a false premise, embodied by the late Colin Powell and his vial of pretend anthrax at the UN, and who were about to watch the world’s richest nations slide into a global financial crisis.

The consensus that had developed between governing parties on the so-called left and right across the Western world regarding national security and capitalism – or war and bailouts, if you will – meant that many voters came to see them as “two cosily fused buttocks of the same giant derriere”, to use a phrase from Christopher Hitchens’ 1999 account of the Clinton administration, No One Left To Lie To.

The results of the backlash have been plain to see on both sides of the Atlantic: in France, the traditional division between Socialists and Gaullists has been swept away, leaving a country to choose between the far right and a party that is little more than a cult of Emmanuel Macron’s personality; while in other European countries the grand bargain over key policy questions (and particularly immigration) has collapsed in the face of smaller parties spruiking “populism”. This is before we talk about the way in which the cable leaks, for example, fertilised the ground for the Arab Spring of 2011 and 2012.

In the United States, a further twist in the collapse of trust came in March 2013, when then director of national intelligence James Clapper told a congressional hearing under oath that the National Security Agency did not collect “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”. It was this denial – which Clapper has since said was the result of a mistake on his part – that Edward Snowden cited in his decision to leak thousands of NSA documents that showed it simply was not true.

Each of these tears in the fabric of our political life has been exploited by governments hostile to the United States and its allies. But they have also created a new and intensely domestic type of right-wing politics, built on older fears of big government, which feeds off the image of a nefarious “deep state” bent on wars abroad. It was this wave that Donald Trump rode all the way to the White House.

Those who believe that Taylor Greene and, closer to home, Matt Canavan are simply Russian assets in the way that, say, Kim Philby once was, could be forgiven their desire to live in a simpler, more bipolar world. But instead we have the world into which Julian Assange ventured as a source-cum-publisher, someone involved in journalism but not himself a journalist in any normal sense of that term.

It is a world where he functions as a kind of Rorschach test, telling us more about ourselves than we ever learn of him. Watching the opposition slam Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for phoning Assange, after a former deputy prime minister from their side had joined a delegation to Washington pressing for his release, one could feel the relevance of the old two-party model ebbing away.

By the same token, when Clapper wrote for the Lowy Institute that “justice has been served” in the case, it was impossible not to hear the sound of declining American power in the world.

As for the optics of a prime minister phoning a convicted felon, come November – if Donald Trump wins the presidency – it could be part of the job description.

Just like Magnetic Island, Assange isn’t the reason the needle gyrates. But the way he has returned to these shores, the following he still commands and the part he has played in changing the world we live in all mean that it may point to him again in the months and years to come.

Maher Mughrabi is an editor and senior writer. He is former features editor and foreign editor.

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