Entourage of idiots fuelling Assange's narcissism

Eric Lobbecke

NARCISSISTS saturate our media. Our voyeurism fuels their narcissism. Witness the new Australian television series Being Lara Bingle. Happily, the target audience of 16-year-old girls watch it and laugh at the self-centred, look-at-me antics of Bingle. But if Bingle's narcissism attracts 16-year-olds smart enough to mock the model, then Julian Assange, a class-A narcissist, has collected quite an entourage of adoring, useful idiots around him.

Assange's target audience is older, usually tertiary educated, invariably left-wing. Many are well-heeled, sophisticated types. And, unlike Bingle's audience, the Assange fan club has been completely duped by a man whose attention-seeking antics are filled with hypocrisy of the highest order. Best described by Nick Cohen in The Guardian as "socialist socialites", the Jemima Khans, the John Pilgers, the Geoffrey Robertsons, the Michael Moores, the Naomi Wolfs and co also like a bit of media attention.

This cheering audience seems not to have noticed that the Assange story has become a media miniseries where, in each episode, the pale computer hacker is the producer, the director and the star. Any reality checks are rejected as interference. Hence, look at me, little Julian, pull the strings of prestigious newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times as they trip over themselves to publish my trove of WikiLeaks exposures. Look at me fall out with these duplicitous newspapers that dared to run stories about me that didn't further my hero-image. Look at me in the British courts being pursued by dark forces trying to extradite me to Sweden under a European arrest warrant so that the evil empire, the US, can grab hold of me. Watch me in the High Court in London battle the Great Satan. Watch me in the British Supreme Court go another round in this David-and-Goliath battle. Watch me go to Strasbourg to seek a better outcome from the European Court of Human Rights. Wait. Scrap that. Now watch me walk through the doors of the embassy of Ecuador to claim political persecution by Sweden for launching a perfectly legal European arrest warrant; by British courts for not overturning the warrant; by Australia for not doing more to help me; and of course, by America for being America.

Even writing about Assange here plays into his bottomless narcissism. Assange's greatest fear is that the world will forget the geeky small-town boy who Bill Keller from The New York Times has described as "elusive, manipulative and volatile", "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous", and someone who was "transformed by his outlaw celebrity". Gone were the derelict clothes, replaced by dyed hair and spivvy thin-legged suits. Assange became consumed by staying in the spotlight. So let's not forget him. Indeed, let us remember the following about him.

As to the sexual assault claims, Assange and his supporters see conspiracies everywhere. His defenders talk about dark forces, honey pots, political stunts and set-ups to get Assange. His fans treat him as the Anwar Ibrahim of Scandinavia, someone on trumped-up sex charges for purely political reasons. It is fanciful nonsense.

Recall one of the prettier useful idiots, Khan, who helped post bail because she believes "in the principle of the human right to freedom of information and our right to be told the truth". Recall too Pilger who described Assange as a "truth-teller". Yet these unthinking supporters of Assange seem terribly uninterested in searching for the truth about the alleged sexual assaults.

Sweden has tough laws about non-consensual sex. Agree or disagree, these are the laws enacted in a democracy. Assange ought to face those charges.

Yet his supporters have reached their verdict about his innocence, free of trials and the hearing of evidence. Surely the sex charges ought to be kept separate from a debate about the virtues and vices of WikiLeaks. US authorities have had two years to seek the extradition of Assange from Britain. They have not done so.

As to WikiLeaks, there is little nobility to be found there. Assange's outfit did nothing to improve our democracy, as his wealthy admirers claim. The dumps of classified data by Assange's outfit were indiscriminate and potentially dangerous. As Keller, executive director of The New York Times, wrote last year, the NYT and other newspapers carefully "redacted the names of ordinary citizens, local officials, activists, academics and others who have spoken to American soldiers or diplomats". Assange's cavalier attitude is driven by a deep anti-Americanism, which happens to coincide with the tendencies of his admirers. Writing in The Guardian last year, Cohen reported that when Assange was confronted by a journalist about the refusal by WikiLeaks to excise such information, Assange replied: "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."

There were real consequences to this reckless dump of data. The Taliban made it known that Afghan insurgents were sifting through the information and drawing up a list of those names released by WikiLeaks. The same people who lambasted the Bush administration for apparently exposing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame have anointed Assange as a hero. Yet, if it was wrong to out Plame (and it was), how can it be right to out Afghans working for the US, effectively delivering them to the Taliban?

WikiLeaks is nothing like the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg withheld four volumes that the US government most feared would be released, relating to diplomatic efforts to resolve the war that included negotiations with other countries and "derogatory comments about the perfidiousness of specific persons involved". Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to help the US government learn from its mistakes. This was a clear case of whistleblowing.

Assange is an anarchic narcissist more concerned with bringing down governments. Especially the US government. In his 2006 essays titled State and Terrorist Conspiracies and Conspiracy as Governance, Assange set out his aim was to disrupt the ability of the US government, which he labels a conspiracy, to share information, and this will, in turn, immobilise the very operations of a conspiracy. With enough leaks and the threat of even more, Assange wrote that "the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller".

Recall too that when media interest was waning, Assange signed a TV deal with the Kremlin-propaganda channel Russia Today, where his anti-Americanism overlapped with the Kremlin's deep loathing of the US. Assange interviewed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, designated as a terrorist organisation by Australia. Assange described him as a freedom fighter who had "fought against the hegemony of the United States". Let's not forget also that Assange interviewed the US-hating President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa. That's why Assange headed for the embassy doors of Ecuador and not Australia. Clearly he has been watching too much Law & Order in his spare time. Contrary to one of its episodes, once Assange leaves the embassy even in an embassy car he is liable to be arrested by British police for breaching bail conditions.

On the bell curve of narcissism, Assange is at the extremes. In an autobiography that Assange walked away from after yet another fight with publishers, he revealed the level of paranoia and egotism: "opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them. First they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out."

By all means, let's not forget Assange. He is a reminder that the too many members of the Left just love a hero who hates America. And never mind the stench of hypocrisy.