by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Julian Assange, the public face of WikiLeaks, is, among many things, cowardly. Courageousness would involve meeting with Iranian dissidents, Russian journalists, Pakistani Christians, or Chinese human-rights activists \u2014 and then releasing any confidential information that they might have about the torment institutionalized by their countries\u2019 authoritarian regimes. That would be risky to Assange, however, since such governments do not customarily go to court against their leakers; they gulag them \u2014 or liquidate them.<\/p>\n So, instead, Assange navigates through the European northwest among the good-life elites whose economic and security protocols he does so much to undermine. Being summoned to a trumped-up Swedish hearing for being an exploitative cad who fails to wear a condom in his ephemeral hook-ups is not the same thing as being dragged into the basement of the Pakistani intelligence service or appearing in an orange jumpsuit on an al-Qaeda execution video. Why does not the peripatetic Assange at least drive about, say, the back roads of the Middle East, Mexico, or Central Africa in his quest for conduits to spread cosmic truth and justice?<\/p>\n In truth, Assange is a sorry product of the postmodern West. He reminds us of the morality of Western shock artists who freely caricature Christianity on the hallowed principle of free speech, but, in a nano-second, censor themselves when Islam might provide an even larger target for their cynical secular disdain. WikiLeaks is the journalistic equivalent of a\u00a0Piss Christ<\/em>\u00a0exhibition of the contemporary art world \u2014 a repellent reminder of the cowardly selectivity of the shock-jock huckster.<\/p>\n Julian Assange is without principles. He seems to think leaking confidential communications proves that the vast right-wing military-industrial-financial complex is harming either the most affluent, free Western population in the history of civilization or the globalized world itself \u2014 one that has done more to eliminate poverty and extend freedom in the last two decades than had been done at any other time in recorded history. We know from Climategate that the world\u2019s green scientists are every bit as conniving, petty, and mean-spirited as any American diplomat. I would like to see the secret communications that buzz back and forth among Hollywood agents, producers, and financiers to learn of the real criteria that led to box-office bombs likeRedacted<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Rendition<\/em>\u00a0being written, cast, financed, and made. Maybe to calibrate the level of sincerity and honesty among our movers and shakers, we can read the minutes of Harvard or Yale tenure committees, some correspondence from the minions of George Soros, or the communications of the UN secretary general \u2014 or, better yet, the encrypted e-mail transcripts of exchanges among the WikiLeaks board. Apparently Assange thinks that confidentiality is trafficked only among the suspicious Western ruling classes, while dissidents like himself are fueled instead by \u201ctruth.\u201d But if a man cannot be honest with a woman during intimacy, what can he be honest about? \u2014 whoops, one should not rush to an Assange-like judgment on the basis of gossip and innuendo; one should wait until the suspicious personage has had his day in court.<\/p>\n So Julian Assange is also a juvenile. Like some warmed-over let-it-all-hang-out Sixties loudmouth, he seems to think that transparency to the fullest is honesty, without a clue that truth is the final product that emerges from a combination of self-reflection, self-doubt, and introspection. These diplomatic cables contain raw gossip, half-baked impressions, innuendos, self-serving snideness, trial balloons, and witticisms among supposedly sober and judicious diplomats. Yet entering such confidential conversations\u00a0in mediis rebus<\/em>\u00a0short-circuits, rather than enhances, the truth. In the adult world, venting to others does not necessarily translate into duplicity; actions are often a better indicator of veracity than rumblings and musings. Only a perpetual adolescent believes that one has to be perfect in word and thought to be good. The United States no doubt is told all the time by preening Gulf sheiks to hit Iran, but that does not mean that we or even they wish to reify such braggadocio. So far the real truth is our actions, which suggest that we do not think it is wise to bomb Iran.<\/p>\n Julian Assange is a narcissist. Like all self-absorbed egos who deny their selfishness, he protests that he wished WikiLeaks to remain an anonymously run, collective effort \u2014 while he ensured that it most certainly would not be, as he jetted the globe, giving dozens of media interviews, leveling threats, pontificating about world leaders who should resign, and promising to drop embarrassing megatonnage of gossip should he, Julian Assange, ever be charged.<\/p>\n Julian Assange has more or less ensured that WikiLeaks would be synonymous with Julian Assange and that he would be its man-of-the-year face on\u00a0Time Magazine<\/em>. Like all narcissists, when reminded that his recklessness will lead to violence, mayhem, and deaths, he dismisses such dangers as insignificant in comparison to the benevolence that he bestows. Note how easily a computer hacker with a criminal record has established himself as judge, jury, and executioner on behalf of world truth. When he says, \u201cI have become a lightning rod,\u201d he means, \u201cI am the Lady Gaga of leaking.\u201d<\/p>\n His one mistake? Assange unfortunately got his sweepstakes trove from Bradley Manning during the Obama administration. Up until then, the global liberal media culture had less of a problem with WikiLeaks, since government disclosures only confirmed the nefarious nature of reactionaries like George W. Bush. But now in the age of progressive governance, we are learning that Secretary Clinton spies, that President Obama\u2019s diplomats are jaded and cynical, and that such disclosures have hurt the presidency of a liberal progressive. It is one thing to canonize a Daniel Ellsberg or transmogrify the serial deceiver Joe Wilson into a victim of Dick Cheney\u2019s dark plots, but quite another to deify a leaker whose machinations will serve to undermine the agenda of Barack Obama. To paraphrase George Orwell, Assange is learning that all leaks are essential \u2014 but some leaks are more essential than others.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Julian Assange, the public face of WikiLeaks, is, among many things, cowardly. Courageousness would involve meeting with Iranian dissidents, Russian journalists, Pakistani Christians, or Chinese human-rights activists \u2014 and then releasing any confidential information that they might have about the torment institutionalized by their countries\u2019 authoritarian regimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[470],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-gE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1157,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wikileaks-selective-mortality\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":0},"title":"WikiLeaks’ Selective Mortality","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2010"","block_context":{"text":"October 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/october-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1105,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-confused-morality-of-wikileaks\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":1},"title":"The Confused Morality of WikiLeaks","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 4, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The latest WikiLeaks trove raises once more the following two issues \u2014 the circumstances of the release of classified documents and their contents. We won\u2019t know the full extent of the diplomatic archives for days, but so far the particulars seem as embarrassing as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":999,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-did-all-that-happen\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":2},"title":"How Did All That Happen?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Improbables There are a number of improbables, anomalies, paradoxes, ironies, absurdities \u2014 call them what you wish \u2014 on the national scene that simply defy reason. We usually fault an ignorant media as culpable for creating narratives that have no basis in fact\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1107,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-age-of-adolescence\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":3},"title":"The Age of Adolescence","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Never-never Land One of the great themes of the 1960s was to \u201cdo your own thing.\u201d But usually \u201cliberation\u201d distilled down to creating your own rules and norms to justify allowing the appetites and passions to run free, while offering some sort of exalted\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9517,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/angry-reader-9\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":4},"title":"Angry Reader","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 17, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Comment from a Reader: \"But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women\u201d TRUMP DID NOT TALK CRUDELY ABOUT WOMEN ON THIS TAPE- HE TALKED ABOUT HIS RIGHT AS A CELEBRITY TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT WOMEN!!! YOUR CONFLATING THE TWO IS\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10592,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/beware-of-narratives-and-misinformation\/","url_meta":{"origin":1032,"position":5},"title":"Beware of Narratives and Misinformation","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 Narratives surrounding the DNC hack & Antifa reveal media bias and government bureaucracy at their worst. \u00a0 U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee e-mail accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen e-mails on WikiLeaks. \u00a0\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Comey"","block_context":{"text":"Comey","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/comey\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1033,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}