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Guy Rundle has responded to Andrew O’Hagan’s “hatchet job” on Julian Assange, seeing the WikiLeaks founder as a kind of unwilling martyr to the the UK’s Left-liberal media establishment.
After two years of silence, O’Hagan recently bared all on the failed autobiography he was hired to ghostwrite for Assange. His epic 26 500-word article in the London Review of Books made waves around the world.
The collaboration between Assange and his ghostwriter – one of the most lucrative and high-profile book deals ever – was arranged in 2011, but collapsed just 159 days later because, as O’Hagan puts it: “The man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world’s secrets simply couldn’t bear his own.”
Rundle, however, believes the content of O’Hagan’s article – and its timing – indicates a a problem broader than personal score-settling. He points out the odd relationship Assange has with the leftist British press, and suggests that it stems from the fact that his views on privacy and power reveal a weakness in its own philosophy.
“[T]here is something about Assange that drives the Left-lib establishment a bit crazy,” Rundle says, “which is why they get into the contradictory position of decrying the cult of personality at the same time as they spend pages on how he eats pasta.” (Specifically lasagne; more specifically, with his hands.)
According to Rundle, the LRB ran the story because it is currently struggling under a 27 million pound debt, and needs “the zing of cheap scandal and voyeurism”. Similarly, he argues that The Guardian‘s “wars” against Assange stem obliquely from the fact that its “project and identity is under great pressure”.
Rundle insists that The Guardian‘s failure to make its internet-age style of journalism profitable, leading to a recent and quite bizarre partnership with Unilever, means that it has “quietly given up”.
Overall, one can’t help but feel that the fascination and ambivalence the Left-lib establishment displays towards Assange has something to do with the crisis in its own project – that of the individual conscience, with no real theory of power, exposing falsehood. WikiLeaks, as a campaigning site, was precisely opposed to that conception, seeing mass leaks against conspiratorial power elites as a way out of the impasse that investigative journalism/whistleblowing had fallen into. Assange’s firm understanding of a way in which the world worked, and his application of that to a strategy, is what energised so many of them. That the regard was not returned in kind appears to have been part of the reason – beyond Assange’s unquestionable errors, gaucheries and self-sabotage – why the turn against him is so fierce.
Book details
- Julian Assange – The Unauthorised Autobiography by Julian Assange
EAN: 9780857863843
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